(Author: Marcia Leveson, Vol. 65 #1, Pesach 2020)
In her recent autobiographical account, A Memoir of Love and Madness (2009), Rahla Xeneopolous wrote: “What is it with Jews and wandering? Like the lost tribes, we’re scattered and flung to the four corners of the earth.’ And as the pace of emigration continues from South Africa, especially to Australia and Israel, the once vibrant tradition of Jewish writing has been inevitably adversely affected by the new exodus.
Among the Jewish authors, both those who have emigrated and those who have remained, certain definite trends and patterns emerge. The sample is small and it is difficult and possibly dangerous to generalize. But I do sense a change in dynamic from the writing of the last twenty years and a return – with variations – to the dynamic of an earlier period.
For example, during the uneasy period around the Second World War, when Jews felt threatened by the pro-Nazi sentiments of the ‘shirt’ movements and the perceived antisemitism of the government, many Jewish writers seemed to avoid using identifiable ‘Jewish’ elements in their writing. This resulted from a need to remain inconspicuous, but perhaps more urgently in order to overcome subliminal feelings of outsiderhood by blending into the wider culture. And we find at the present, with growing public unease among many regarding the policies of Israel, and the Lebanon and Gaza wars in particular, another period of self-examination. Recently, the experience of ambivalence and outsiderhood has for some South African Jews, for some dramatically and for others more covertly, replaced the sense of solidarity with Jewish identity and Israel. While this might be the reason why some writers choose subjects not at all connected with Jewish identity, that could also merely be a result of the absorption of Jews into mainstream society and their vivid engagement with South African and personal issues.
Sometimes the only thing that identifies a novel or story as being ‘Jewish’ writing is the name of the author. Perhaps, too, some of the writers discussed might choose not to be identified as Jews. Frequently the author’s ‘Jewishness’ is peripheral and unnecessary to the plot. In David Medalie’s fine novel The Shadow Follows (2006), for example, chapters are titled according to the ten plagues and there are some very minor Jewish characters. But this is not ‘Jewish’ writing. Nor is Stephen Finn’s fascinating and original Soliloquy (2009). Erica Emdon’s novel, Jelly Dog Days (2009) is a searing expose of child abuse, imaginatively reconstructed from interviews, and has not a Jew in sight.
Paradoxically, among the majority of Jewish writers there has recently been a marked celebration of Jewishness, the retrieval of the past of the shtetl, of the struggle and success of the immigrants in South Africa. This trend – combining memory and imagination – started way back in the 1960s with Dan Jacobson’s saga of family life, The Beginners (1966). Perhaps it is significant that Jacobson had by then long emigrated and had the freedom to use a long lens. It was continued by Rose Zwi, who also emigrated, in her novels of the 1980s.
Often a first novel, or at least one major novel, is an epic, a bildungsroman, and the continuum leads from Eastern Europe, thorough the early years in South Africa, and now even on to the perils of making a go of things after emigrating, usually to Australia. If overdone, this could easily become a cliché, although to read about and revel in the stories of our ancestors is a basic human need, and in South Africa this has been particularly successful.
Maja Kriel’s Rings in a Tree (2004) – an often poetical and finely imagined family saga stretching from Eastern Europe to the present – was the first of a number that followed. In Patricia Schonstein: A Quilt of Dreams, (2006), set in Grahamstown during the political unrest of the 1980s, the main character is Reuben (Baby) Cohen van Tonder – note the significance of the conflation of the Jewish and Afrikaans name. The centre of the novel treats Reuben’s immigrant Jewish grandparents, and the plot stretches from Kristallnacht to the fate of the Cradock Four. Hazel Frankel’s tense and disturbing Counting Sleeping Beauties (2009) cleverly weaves the past of the shtetl with the present and, significantly, with the lives of black servants who were and are still so much part of South African suburbia. Given the facts of South African life, this drive to integrate black and Jewish experience in the ‘quilt’ of South African experience will no doubt continue for a while.
It may be that the current emphasis on repossession of the past has been encouraged by the work the Kaplan Centre in Cape Town and Beyachad in Johannesburg. It would also seem to be connected to a sense of urgency with the past is fast retreating. Perhaps, too, in the new political disposition, there is a freedom from former restraints and a new confidence to write about a particular ethnic past.
And hence, too, the impulse to explore the narratives of the elders, even to uncover or imagine family secrets of the shtetl or in South Africa. The 1950s seems to be the preferred period for fiction, seemingly because it was a time of upward mobility for the Jews, with one foot still in Eastern Europe of the grandparents, and another confronting a changing society.
Frequently there is the secret story of forbidden love, either in der heim or among the white employers and black servants, or incest, or homosexual encounters. Barry Levy’s startling Burning Bright (2004) is an example. Joanne Fedler’s first novel before her emigration – The Dreamcloth (2005) – is another. And Charles Cohen’s magnificent People have stolen from me (2004), with a strong basis in historical fact, is a commentary, not so much on Jewish experience but on the state of South Africa today, particularly aspects of crime. Cohen has also emigrated and he has expressed his own sense of the freedom being outside South Africa gives him to write with objectivity as well as intimacy.
Another prominent current trend is of writing at least part, often a major part, of the novel from the point of view or in the voice of a child. Besides Finn and Emdon’s work, included in this category are Kriel’s Rings in a Tree and Frankel’s Counting Sleeping Beauties, as well as Tony Epirile’s aptly named The Persistence of Memory (2004) and Anne Landsman’s much acclaimed second novel, The Rowing Boat (2009). Landsman has long lived in New York and has eloquently expressed how her novels – like so many others at the present time – have been inspired by childhood memories and nostalgia. At times, the use of a child narrator works very well, but I feel that the authors often struggle to find an authentic voice. The problem arises, I think, from the current fashion to write in the first person (and even the second person) and in the present tense. This is technically tricky to sustain and gives rise to all sorts of false notes, while the subject matter itself dealt with by our young novelists is almost invariably deeply moving and significant.
With the acceleration emigration, the writers often tell their tale for the global market. Some of the new works by contemporary Jewish writers contain a glossary of Yiddish, Afrikaans and Sotho words. Yiddish is no longer one of the shameful stigmata of the Jew, but here retrieved as the language of beloved grandparents. Afrikaans, too – so strongly part of the fabric of our growing up – filters into a number of novels, together with an almost mandatory use of black languages. It seems that from a distance, either of time – post-1994, or of place – the new diaspora, the Jew looks back to the South Africa of his growing up with no sense of vulnerability, and instead of choosing or fearing difference, claims belonging.
David Smiedt’s Are we there Yet? Chasing a Childhood Through South Africa (2004) is not a novel, but points to a new trend. It is a travelogue of South Africa from an émigré, now returned as a visitor, viewing it with the eyes of a stranger who is yet a familiar. The love/hate relationship with the old country is plain here. There is no longer a desire to belong, but more urgently a need to defend the choice to emigrate.
But among the solemnity one finds a refreshing humor. Smiedt, Cohen and others lace their satire with fun and a lightness of touch. Mona Berman’s witty Email from a Jewish mother (2001) and Email from a Jewish Grandmother (2008) may well be prophetic of a new trend. Children and parents now keep in touch by email and Skype. Is this the new writing? In fact, will South African Jewish fiction survive as we have known it, or is a new trend of instant communication threatening to eclipse our proud tradition?
Dr. Marcia Leveson, a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs and a long-serving member of its editorial board, is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand. Her publications include People of the Book: Images of the Jew in South African English Fiction, 1882-1992, published in 1996.
