Dorothy And Morris Medalie hen Dorothy Medalie met the man who would become her hus- band, she had no idea how her life would change. Dr. Morris Medalie, now a retired pe- diatrician, came to the United States from South Africa during World War II, bring- ing his brother for medical treatment. (Wounded in the army, his brother is now a paraplegic.) After the Medalies married in 1947, they moved to South Africa, where they lived for 12 years. "Life was good for whites in South Africa," Mrs. Medalie says — and for Jews. During those years, three of Jo- hannesburg's six mayors were Jewish. "At that time, there was very little crime," she says. Only "petty crime be- cause the bulk of [black] Africans had no way of making [a wage]. Bank robberies were unheard of" Dr. Medalie grew up on a farm about 100 miles from JohanneSburg, in a town called Trichard. At age 10, he went to a boarding school in `Jo'Burg! "My father was very influential," he recalls. "My brother and I were the first Jewish board- ers to go to school there." "Once we had children, we moved to a house," Mrs. Medalie says. Their one- acre property had 51 fruit trees, and four servants lived in a cottage on the grounds. The Medalies, who reside in West Bloomfield, have three children, James, Russell and Sally Shapiro, and two grand- children, Brent and Allison. When they left South Africa in 1959, the Medalies first went to Boston, then to Detroit, where Dr. Medalie worked for one of the first HMOs, Community Health Association. In 1962 Dr. Medalie became chief of pe- diatrics at Springfield Hospital in west- ern Massachusetts. After about a decade, he and his family returned to Detroit, where Dr. Medalie became chief of pedi- Africa differed based on climate and population. Johannesburg has been likened to New York in scale of its Jew- ish community, and Cape Town com- pared to San Diego. On the southeast coast, Durban, South Africa's third- largest Jewish community, was small- er but supported both an Orthodox and a Reform congregation, Audrey Sobel says. Durban is on the east coast in the Na- tal Province and has between 4,000 and 5,000 Jews today, 10,000 when Mrs. So- bel was growing up there. Mrs. Sobel came to Detroit in 1985 with her hus- band Jack, chief of infectious diseases at Wayne State University. They im- migrated to the States in 1981. In comparison to other cities, Detroit does not have a large community of South African Jews. There are perhaps 20 families, and they come from all over South Africa. The largest North Amer- ican population centers of South African Jews are Toronto and San Diego. Dr. Medalie was the first of Detroit's South African Jews to come to the States. He met his wife, Dorothy, in Boston in 1945, and the pair returned to South Africa after they married in 1947. They stayed for 12 years. But ultimately, they decided to leave. 'e didn't want to raise our children in a racist atmosphere," Mrs. Medalie says. "And here we are — in Detroit." Like most other Jews, the Medalies had hired help in South Africa; often, the help lived on their properties. "I formed a very close relationship [with the workers], especially with my cook-general housekeeper," Mrs. Medalie says. "She was like a mother to me." Even after they left South Africa, the Medalies retained contact with the woman until her death a few years ago. What, and who, they left behind con- tinues to haunt many of the former South Africans. "It's more in the soul, I think" that you miss South Africa, Alan Goodman says. "There's a certain smell in Africa when you get off the plane. Some peo- ple say it's the ozone. It goes right through to my soul." Nor was the transition to the United States easy, despite the lack of obvious barriers, such as language. Leaving a large, close-knit family for a new country was difficult, Ms. Slater says. "Here, I didn't know anyone. I didn't come as a refugee. I spoke Eng- lish, so everyone assumed there wouldn't be any cultural difference." While the Jews of South Africa came to the United States as educated Eng- lish-speakers, "no one in Detroit was waiting for us," Ms. Slater says. Many say the Detroit Jewish community did not open its arms to South African Jew- ish expatriates. "Russian Jews who came here clear- ly had refugee status," Dr. Sapeika says. 'We came speaking the language, very Anglicized, some with money...so we were not awarded any of the collective Jewish community efforts to facilitate integration into the community." "The only organized movement of W /- /-- attics at Henry Ford Hospital's Fairlane satellite. "There is not really a sense of commu- nity here" among Detroit's South African Jews, Mrs. Medalie says. "Most South African families are much younger than we are. Another reason might be that I'm an American, don't have a common bond of growing up with them." The Medalies visit South Africa year- ly and say the country has changed dras- tically since they lived there. "When we were there the first time, it was a white South Africa, as far as we were concerned," Dr. Medalie says. "Now it's a black South Africa." On a recent trip, they gleaned that blacks "are upset because they haven't gotten Mandela's promises fast enough," Mrs. Medalie says. She believes that "whites are being oppressed." Under af- firmative action, "whites can't get a job. There is a shortage of doctors because many emigrated, and even though there are not enough black doctors, they won't give white doctors jobs. They just offered white teachers an early retirement bonus, but there aren't enough trained [black teachers] to replace them." In South African medical schools to- day, many of which have lost accredita- tion, 85-90 percent of the students are black, she says. South Africa has invited Cuban doc- tors and teachers — "who don't know any of the 11 languages" — to fill those posi- tions, she says. "It's a very difficult thing to bring a mostly tribal people into the 20th centu- ry, now almost the 21st century. It takes two to three generations," Mrs. Medalie says. ❑ . , 0') LC, _J - CC Harry and Ray Maisel: "Good friends of ours stayed, fought, went to jail." 73