The Last Time I Dated a Goy

 

A coming-of-age tale of forbidden longing, liberal idealism, and family hysteria in 1960s South Africa.

The last time I dated a goy was when I was eighteen. We were living in Johannesburg, and I was immersed in the heady world of ideas at the University of the Witwatersrand. It was, quite simply, the time of my life.

University was a revelation. It felt like I'd been handed the keys to the kingdom—intellectually intoxicating, thrillingly unstructured. I joined every cause that tugged at my spirit: the Students’ Zionist Association, the National Union of South African Students, the League Against Animal Cruelty. I read like crazy, devouring Camus, Sartre, Freud, and Jung.  I was enticed by ideas and stimulated to explore who I wanted to be.

Like most Jewish princesses of my generation, I gravitated to the humanities. I majored in sociology and psychology, dreaming of helping people understand themselves—or perhaps, more to the point, finally understanding myself. When William James talked about the “booming, buzzing confusion,” he described me to a T.

Introduction to Psychology was a rude awakening. I signed up expecting Oedipal dilemmas and existential exploration. Instead, we studied rats. cell transmission, Pavlov, Skinner, Hebbian theory. Love—once poetic and mystical—was reduced to a conditioned reflex. We were over a hundred students in that class, all white, upper-middle-class English speakers from the northern suburbs, with a generous sprinkling of Jewish surnames.

In an act of mild rebellion (or romantic yearning), I enrolled in Biblical Studies—driven partly by my fascination with Christian parables and partly by my quiet infatuation with Professor Tertius, a severe yet soulful Afrikaans Dominee with kind cornflower eyes and a voice like rock salt. He taught the parables of Jesus with reverence and never tried to convert the Jews in his class. He simply fretted about our immortal souls, and I suspect he prayed earnestly for mine.

And that is where I met Steven Clark. He was older, in his late twenties, from then-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and he walked with a certain intellectual swagger that captivated me. He wasn't conventionally handsome, but something about his tweeds, pipe, and five o'clock shadow sent my hormones into overdrive.

Steven was everything my world wasn’t: internationalist, iconoclastic, boldly liberal at a time when South Africans barely whispered dissent. He spoke freely across racial and religious lines and had a gift for deflating authority with biting satire. Before the word “groupie” entered the lexicon, he already had an entourage—and I was determinedly part of it.

I adored him. While my lecturers droned on about Samoan sexual mores, I daydreamed about Steven. I plotted our first date with the cunning of a covert operative, but we were only friends, and Steven, for all his awareness, didn’t seem to notic my moonstruck stares in class.

Eventually, he invited me to his student commune in Braamfontein. The place buzzed with pot smoke, folk guitars, and ragtag revolutionaries. I was naïve, still living at home, untouched by weed, and my small acts of emancipation were limited to flirting with activists, fraternizing with Gentiles, and making goo-goo eyes at Steven.

I had dreamed that that evening was to be my moment. But instead of seduction, there was political discourse—Steven held court while I perched on his knee and looked from one person to another.

I never said a word; what could I add to all these sophisticated opinions? If they were pro-internationalism, I was pro-internationalism. If they were passionate about John Milton, I vowed to read his poems the minute I got home. If they loved Joan Baez, of course, I did too. I had no idea what I really thought about anything. Everyone around me seemed so sure of their convictions while I zig-zagged from one opinion to another!

By the time I was alone with Steven, I was a bundle of nerves. Finally, we lay on his bed with our arms around each other and caressed each other. When he kissed me, I thought I might faint. My mother's warnings faded from awareness. I forgot her admonitions about unwanted pregnancies and bastard children.  I deafened myself to the sound of her hysteria when she would find out that the man who deflowered her princess was not even Jewish.

We kissed, and I lost myself in the soft thrum of Steven’s arms. But fate had other plans when someone called Joannie barged into the room, sat down and made herself comfortable, and  launched into an unsolicited discussion about whether Scott Fitzgerald was a victim of his wife’s madness or whether he’d driven her crazy. Although I gave her the fisheye, she ignored me, and eventually I gave up.

Another attempt was squashed when Steven gallantly visited me while I had the flu. A Gentile suitor, visiting the Jewish princess at my home? Never. My mother treated him like an insurance salesman, delivering tea with the warmth of a glacier. That night, chaos reigned. My mother wailed like a Yiddish opera star about going around with Gentiles. Aren’t there sufficient Jewish students around? My father, ever more composed, warned me not to forget that if I married a Gentile, our children would grow up to be anti-Semites. “Remember Hitler?” he asked gravely, reminding me that the Nazis dug back two or three generations to uncover Jews trying to pass as Aryans, and sent them to the gas chambers.

 

I responded with furious indignation. My relationship with Steven was completely innocent.  I was nowhere near getting married to him.  My father said, “It’s easier to get into things than to get out of them.”  My mom forbade me from going out with him.  And I responded by writing a manifesto titled You Can’t Steal My Mind, insisting that they’d always taught me to think for myself, and could not change their minds now that this no longer suited them. It was all very adolescent. Very self-righteous

 

But Steven, stoic, amused, bewildered, stood by me. He did not love me, not really. But perhaps he admired my spunk and sympathized with my stand against my parents.

One evening, I got my wish—Steven invited me on a proper date.

Since he wasn’t allowed to pick me up from home, we arranged a secret rendezvous down the road. With a resigned sigh, Steven agreed. “Wouldn’t it be better if I just spoke to your parents?” he asked. “Maybe if they got to know me, they’d like me?” Ha, that would be the day! He didn’t know my parents. 

That evening he took me to The Troubadour Club, Johannesburg’s temple of folk music. I was over the moon. This wasn’t some activist hangout with the guys. This was a date.

The club buzzed with candles and smoke and the strum of guitars. I wore a pink checked shoestring dress, my hair in a chignon, and pointy little slippers that made me look like a Kewpie doll. Steven, in his usual tweeds and pipe, looked every bit the aging undergraduate intellectual. We had a little table to ourselves.

On stage, Des and Dawn Lindberg performed their signature folk duets—his voice warm and golden, hers charmingly flat but full of heart. Their hit at the time was a sentimental number about two little boys who go to war. When one is wounded, the other turns his horse around:

“Do you think I would leave you cry-ying, When there’s room on my horse for two…”

We sang along. We flirted. We sipped Pimm’s Cups and giggled in the candlelight. I was tipsy on alcohol and attention. Idly, I began to play with my empty glass—holding it to the flame, humming into it, pressing it to my cheeks, my lips, my forehead. I had no idea why. I was simply caught up in the magic of the moment. Steven watched me with rapt fascination. The more he gazed, the more beautiful I felt—and the more I preened, and pressed, and played.

He drove me home, eyes still fixed on me like I was the eighth wonder of the world. I was certain he was falling in love. I was already picturing the soft dissolves of our future romance, complete with sensual awakenings and Bach on vinyl.

We parked a few houses away. Under the streetlamp’s glow, I leaned into him, waiting for the kiss that would seal the night. But Steven hesitated. Perhaps he was too mature to make out in public. Perhaps too, he still carried the sting of my parents’ rejection. With awkward haste, he muttered goodnight and drove away.

Hormones humming, I tiptoed into the house and caught sight of myself in the hallway mirror. Expecting to see a radiant, luminous creature, I leaned in.

And gasped.

My face looked swollen, my red lips looked gross, obscene. Panicked, I turned on the lights to examine myself and made out charcoal rings around my mouth, cheeks, and eyes. All evening, while Steven Clark stared at me in what I thought was awe-struck passion, I’d been serenading him with a face distorted like a gargoyle. And he hadn’t said a thing!

That was the last time I dated a goy.

💬 Ever fallen for the idea of someone, or watched your fantasies go up in smoke in a single glance in the mirror? Share your stories below. I’d love to know what “the last time” meant for you