Published: 8 October 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THE UNMISTAKABLY FEMALE RONNI KAHN AO - wife, lover, mother, grandmother, one-time high-heeled corporate businesswoman and now silver-haired charity “vixen” - has known all her life she was initially a disappointment to father, Abe.
Born in the early 1950s, in apartheid-era South Africa, that’s obvious in her very name. After two daughters, Abe Hellmann had already chosen his long-awaited son’s name: Ronni.
Like A Boy Named Sue in the Johnny Cash song, Ronni has been bedevilled by gender confusion ever since.
As her new memoir, A Repurposed Life, reveals, the young Ronni grew up feeling loved and spoilt by Abe and mother Sylvia - but inwardly inferior.
One sister was considered “the beauty”, another “the character”. By comparison, Ronni felt plain and uncharismatic: content to follow convention, play by wicked apartheid rules, and ignore the bigger picture.
“For much of my life I’ve been a follower,” Kahn says - a statement that will confound anyone who knows her as an inspirational leader with a global impact.
Such adjectives as driven, purposeful, pushy, bolshy, relentless and visionary often appear before her name.
“For much of my life I’ve been a follower,” Kahn says - a statement that will confound anyone who knows her as an inspirational leader with a global impact.
Yet it was her parents’ decision, not hers, to leave South Africa for Israel when she was 17 to study art history and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Likewise, it was first husband Des who led them to Yizre’el kibbutz in the Jezreel valley where they raised two sons, Nadav and Edo.
While living, not entirely happily, at the kibbutz, Ronni experienced the first of three events she credits with irrevocably changing her life.
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In the ‘70s, she went with her sister to a French hairdresser in Haifa who, without asking, gave Ronni her first perm. Not just any perm but a tightly-curled afro.
That perm gets an entire chapter in her biography. Sadly, there are no photos, but she never regarded herself in the same way again post-perm.
How could anything as inconsequential as a hair-do have had such a long-lasting influence on her life? “My hair was a non-event. It was lank, skinny,” she says. “So when I suddenly looked at myself with this six inch ‘fro’ it made me feel like a newly born woman.
“It transformed me. I felt fundamentally different and, I promise you, it made other people look at me differently.”
Even at Yize’el she went from being largely invisible to highly visible. “That perm gave me a power I never had before.”
Significantly, it was Ronni’s ultimatum to Des that she and her sons would be leaving the kibbutz - with or without him - which prompted the family to emigrate to Australia in 1988.
The trigger? Nadav was fast approaching 14 which meant he would be registered for mandatory military service.
Des had served in the 1973 Yom Kippur War when she was pregnant. Her memoir describes the constant fear she and the other women in the kibbutz suffered. Not from their own fate, but from lack of news of loved ones at the frontline. That chapter ends with the moving words: “The night Des returned home, I blessed my belly with my tears.
“Blessed be the memory of the 2600 Israeli soldiers and 16,000 Arabs who were killed in that war. “Blessed be the memory of Neil, Dude and Shaul (close friends from the kibbutz instantaneously killed in a single tank attack).”
By her own admission, Ronni had been an innocent abroad when she arrived in Israel. Only then did she fully realise just how despicable the apartheid of the country of her birth had been.
But there had been plenty of clues. Three South Africans - two women and a man - had made a lasting impact she now readily acknowledges.
“Florrie was my surrogate mother,” she says, referring to the beloved black nannie who raised her while her natural mother was enjoying the privileged life of lunches and social events that every white woman in apartheid took as life-as-normal.
“Many white people of that apartheid-era have never really discussed that we were all raised by these loving black nannies,” Ronni says.
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“To look after me, Florrie had to leave her own family. Yet those black nannies came and went, and were considered disposable.”
One of the worst moments of Ronni’s life was waking up, aged eight, to find Florrie had left without a chance of saying goodbye. My parents were very caring but no-one thought to prepare me for the fact she was leaving. Or discuss what happened to her afterwards.” The adult Ronni has searched for Florrie since - but never found her.
Abe and Sylvia Hellmann were typical “Whites” of apartheid, relishing their elevated lifestyle without complaint about the racist system that enabled it.
But the Hellmanns lived next door to Jules and Selma Browde, whose children were Ronni’s juvenile playmates. “Jules and Selma were activists, working to change apartheid,” Ronni says. “My parents were re-activists, doing nothing to change it.”
Jules, a lawyer, had watched as a young tall black man walked into their first university law lecture and searched for a vacant seat.
Every other student was white, and made it clear they wouldn’t sit next to the black upstart. Jules, however, beckoned him to the seat next to him. They became lifelong friends, though they saw little of each other for years because the black student, Nelson Mandela, was imprisoned on Robben Island.
Selma, a doctor who chose to work in a non-white hospital, was even more of an inspiration to Ronni. When Jules told his wife that Nelson had to study by candlelight in Soweto (then a sprawling slum city providing labour for white Johannesburg), Selma responded with a campaign to get Soweto connected to the electricity grid.
“Selma is now 94,” Ronni says. “I spoke to her this week, and she’s still a powerhouse, still indomitable. “Her ability to see wrong and do her best to correct it has never left her. She stuck her neck out when millions of white South Africans - including my parents - closed their eyes.”
Selma was also instrumental in the birth of OzHarvest.
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Most of the media interest in A Repurposed Life - co-written with daughter in law, Jessica Chapnik Kahn - has focused on Chapter 17: After seven years with an American she calls “Anton”, who had lavished her with gifts, love and attention, Ronni discovered she’d been living a charade. He’d been multi-married, a serial charlatan, a cashed-up cad.
Friends and family had tried to warn her. But it was only when she was confronted by Anton’s latest girlfriend kissing him in a private hospital suite - surrounded with flowers Ronni hadn’t sent - that she realised what a dupe she’d been. That humiliation was the second of the three pivotal events she referred to.
Yet out of bad things, good things grow. “After ‘Anton’ I reached a point in my life where I examined who I was, the kind of person I wanted to be, and why I’d been put on this earth,” Ronni says.
As one of Sydney’s most exclusive event organisers, she had long agonised over the amount of superb quality food that went to waste after each event.
In the wake of discovering the truth about Anton, Ronni flew to South Africa to take stock of her life with Selma. By then, Ronni had been introduced to Hindu guru Amma Narayani, by son Edo.
This was the third encounter which changed her life. Today she describes herself as “a devotee of Amma, my spiritual teacher, but he has never asked anyone to renounce their religion. So I’ve never had to revoke Judaism. My spirituality is a blend.”
In 2004, Ronni - spurred on by Selma - founded OzHarvest to feed the homeless and disadvantaged. The rest is history.
A Repurposed Life, Ronni Kahn with Jessica Chapnik Kahn, Murdoch Books, $32.99.
Main photo: Ronni Kahn with her perm and son Nadav, on kibbutz in Israel; taste-testing wasted produce on a Queensland farm
