(Reviewer: Hilda Sandak-Lewin, Vol. 66, #3, Chanukah 2011)
Doctor Azila Talit Reisenberger, Head of the Hebrew Studies Department at the University of Cape Town and author of a number of well-known poetry books and plays in both English and Hebrew, has produced a most entertaining book with the audacious title: The Other Booker Prize.
If her poetry is in the main deeply personal, this book (described on the cover as a Memoir of a Fictitious Character), is a roller coaster of adventures and misadventures with amazing, sometimes life altering co-incidences, derived both from her own experiences as well as those of various friends and woven into a fabric of frolic stories in which autobiography, biography and imagination are intertwined.
Reisenberger writes with sparkling honesty and unabashedly sends herself up, as when she describes her lack of linguistic skills and teenage lack of discipline. The only sentence she recalls of her French lessons at school are from her exasperated teacher who would tell her to “sortie de la classe”. With a simple twist of phrase, she turns the mundane into merriment: “After the Israeli army had survived my two years’ service…”
The author’s accounts of her escapades in Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy (“far enough from her home to do her own thing, but close enough to drop off her laundry”) once again thoroughly amuse. Instructed to design something which will benefit the community, she designs a toilet! She justifies her design but impresses not her lecturer, at which point she throws in the towel and decides to go travelling.
Again with total honesty, Reisenberger reveals another side of her personality – her vulnerability.
No longer the impudent imp at school or in the army, she is faced with weeks of loneliness in countries where she cannot communicate with anyone as she speaks only Hebrew. How she deals with this loneliness and how misfortune turns into good fortune through her tenacity, resourcefulness and courage, makes fascinating reading.
Reisenberger’s later entry into Cape Town as an invisible unknown, struggling to find her feet as a new immigrant who can barely speak English, and how she arrived step by step where she is today – a well-known, much loved personality – likewise makes compelling reading (always with a touch of humour thrown in!)
Underlying all lie the thread of morality ingrained in the author by her mother since childhood: “What is right is right – and what is wrong is wrong”, something she fiercely adhered to as shown in the various incidents recounted. Her father’s influence to be nice to people and not to embarrass them is another lesson that she has carried with her through life – though she proves again and again that she is no sissy and when called for will “get even” for the sake of justice.
This is a good, easy read in colloquial language – but reader, beware! Do not fall into the trap of believing that everything you read really happened. It is after all The Memoir of a Fictitious Character.
The Other Booker Prize by Azila Talit Reisenberger. Published by Pretext in association with Green Sea Publishers. Cape Town, 2011.
Hilda Sandak-Lewin sang for CAPAB (Cape Performing Arts Board) for over thirty years before her retirement. She studied Hebrew under Azila Reisenberger at the University of Cape Town.
