I was born the daughter of a German Jewish Holocaust Survivor and a ‘poor white’ Afrikaner ‘boere meisie.’ Both, in the year that I was born in ‘sunny South Africa,’ were outcasts in their society. As their daughter, the English called me a rock-spider, the Afrikaners called me a ‘damn Jewess,’ and the Jews called me a ‘gattas.’ The word ‘gattas’ is a combination of Yiddish and Afrikaans and means the bum.
In other words, my privilege made me ostracized from all the societies I was exposed to in the 50s and 60s in South Africa.