These dolls belonged to our grandmother, who we called ‘Gaga’. Her name was Carol Rose Pesskin and she was born in Johannesburg, capital of South Africa in 1937. Her grandparents had fled persecution in what was then Lithuania from pogroms visited by the Russian imperial authorities on her Jewish Ashkenazi community.
She grew up speaking Afrikaans and Yiddish (a language spoken by Eastern European Jewry which is a mixture of Hebrew, German as well as English and French. We don’t know where she got these Ndebele dolls, but the Ndebele are the local tribe living in the north-east of South Africa (where Johannesburg is), so perhaps she knew some Ndebele people who gave her the dolls, or perhaps she bought them in a market.
The Ndebele women are famous for their bead work, making the colourful neck hoops they wear as well as these bride dolls. Dolls like these two would have been given to a girl the day she married by her immediate family in the hope she would make a big and healthy family.
Lola (Year 11) and Saskia (Year 10) Pesskin