Another Van Pletsen Storyteller

Dina-Ann Boessenkool

Introduced by Roon Lewald

My cousin Dina Ann is providing fresh proof that the ancestors of the Van Pletsen tribe all qeued up to kiss the blarney stone. Dina’s mother (my Aunt René, who is still hale enough at 89 to plan her umpteenth trip to Europe this year) is the  last survivor of my maternal grandfather Frans van Pletsen’s brood of four daughters and one son. The story-telling gift which prompted my own mother (Reinet’s elder sister Helen) to record the family’s history in her “Van Pletsen Saga” has resurfaced in Dina Ann Boessenkool (née Vincent).

On Afrikaans

There is, for me, something remarkable about well-crafted Afrikaans prose. Her words are fertile; a faithful translation into English will often demand of a translator three words for each pregnant Afrikaans word. She remains, for this writer, a language that at once embraces and estranges her readers, for she is essentially tribal.

Any engelsprekende that has ever ventured into a conversation in Afrikaans with Afrikaners might know what I’m trying to place my finger on: his toungue immediately betrays him as an outsider; there is an awkward moment of sheer horror when conversation halts — and resumes — in English. There is little to no middle ground for those who speak Afrikaans as a second, third or foreign language. Our battered vocabulary and slaughtered syntax betray us immediately for the buitelanders that we are. It is our shiboleth.

Inyoni

In memory of my sister, Deanne Seneschal Raszat, née Lewald, born 31 Jan. 1940 in Durban, South Africa; died 26 Sept. 1996 in Leimen-Gauangelloch, Germany

By Roon Lewald

Deanne

After cancer won a five-year battle for my elder sister’s life, my brother-in-law sent me a parcel of old studio recordings of Deanne’s singing recitals made by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC/SAUK) between 1953 and 1958. Apart from a pile of yellowed newspaper clips and eistedfodd certificates, they were all that remained of the years when my mother’s coaching of Deanne’s voice propelled her into brief local prominence as a promising young singer. My dutiful elder sister had already been slaving away at her piano lessons for nearly five years when, at the age of 10, our Ma yoked her girlish lyrical soprano too into the musical harness of our parents, both of them singing teachers. At the age of 13, she piped German Lieder and Afrikaans liedjies into an SABC mike for the first time and was introduced on the nationwide “Young South Africa” programme as a young singer with a great future.

The Van Pletsen Saga

by Helen Lewald (nee Van Pletsen)

Translated by Blane van Pletzen-Rands

(Klik vir Afrikaans)

(Click for Genealogy)

Here follows The van Pletsen Saga , which I have promised to write down before I become senile and can’t remember anything. I cannot guarantee that all the facts, dates, etc., are accurate, because what I am writing is based on hearsay on what father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and old aunts and uncles have told me!

According to my uncle Sauer van Pletsen (who had journalistic leanings and allowed a few books to see the light of day), one, Carl Johannes von Plessen, born 1795 in East Prussia, ran into difficulty with the authorities and left that land and established himself in Brabant, Belgium. (Grandfather’s sister, Aunt Mart Vorster, boasted the fact that we Van Pletsens were originally Von Plessens and, therefore, belonged to the German aristocracy and then my father’s brother, the stately childishly absurd uncle Kootjie, always deflated her with these words: “Oh well, Auntie Mart. The old rascal was probably a horse thief. That’s why he had to get out of East Prussia!”)

Helen van Pletsen – the Nightingale of Natal

By Roon Lewald, son of Helen van Pletsen, author of “The Van Pletsen Saga”

In a personal twist to the old show-biz saying that “you haffta be Jewish”, my Afrikaner mother had a stock diagnosis of people she considered too humourless to appreciate the funny side of life. Irritated by an encounter with some particularly dour, self-righteous grudge-bearer, she would shrug and say: “His / her problem is a lack of irony in the blood.”