Choosing Difference: South African Jewish Writers.

LENTA, MARGARET

JEWISH IMMIGRATION INTO SOUTH AFRICA ON ANY CONSIDERABLE scale began relatively late: there were a few Jewish families amongst the wave of English-speaking colonists who arrived in 1820, but they do not seem to have had the time, the impulse, or perhaps the confidence to record their lives in journals or to write poetry or fiction. English literature began in South Africa during the First British Occupation of the Cape (1795-1803), when the travel memoirs, letters and diaries which generally constitute the beginning of a colonial literature were written. But interesting though the works of visitors to the Cape like Lady Anne Barnard, John Barrow, and their fellows are, it is arguable that they form part of the literature of the metropolis rather than the colony, at least in their ideologies and their envisaged readership. None of these colonist-visitors to Africa were Jewish, though Jewish settlement had already begun, even at this early stage: Lady Anne writes of a Jew who wanted to buy a house at Newlands i n the Cape (Barnard 1999). The history of South African writing in English is therefore a short one; though South African Jewish writers loom large in it at the present day, they are comparatively late arrivals on the scene.

Imaginative writing in English is generally considered to have begun in 1883

with Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm. It is clear that this work was an important influence on South African Jewish writers: Dan Jacobson, in 1970, wrote an introduction to the work which is still one of the best pieces of commentary on it, and which forms an inspiring introduction to postcolonialism in general. Large scale Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, however, and especially from Lithuania, homeland of the majority of South African Jews, was only getting underway in the 1880s.

Marcia Leveson's critical work People of the Book: Images of the Jew in South African English Fiction 1880-1992 offers, at much greater length and in far more considered form, a different and complementary view. She gives an account of Jewish immigration into South Africa (or rather into the territories which were consolidated in 1910 into South Africa). By 1858, she says, there were sixty Jewish families in the Cape Colony, mostly from Britain and Germany. After the discovery of diamonds and gold in the 1860s, immigration of all kinds of people from Europe speeded up. The pogroms following the assassination of the Czar Alexander II in 1881, together with other less extreme but punitive measures against Jews in Russian-ruled territories, caused a large influx of Jews, from Lithuania especially. Leveson writes "In 1880 there were about 4,000 Jews in the country: in 1891 Jews numbered 10,000; and by 1899 there were about 24,000 Jews in a total white population estimated at 850 000" (1996: 16).

The great days of immigration, of course, were by no means over at the turn of the century, but let no one imagine that all immigrants were offered an equal welcome, then or later, by the authorities. The anxiety of the colonial British to maintain their position of power caused them to resent the growing presence of white but non-English people. And the Gape Dutch (later known as Afrikaners) began in the 1890s the long process of urbanization which culminated in the legislation of the era of Apartheid (1948-1990) when many urban occupations in the modern sector were defined as "whites only" (Davenport 1984: 298). Early in this long trek to the cities, which, significantly, speeded up in the 1930s, when European antisemitism was infecting South African white attitudes, they encountered as rivals the Jews. Leveson gives an account of the attitudes generated by this encounter: "many farmers, suffering from the distress of the Anglo-Boer war, from drought and cattle disease, went bankrupt and were forced to sel l their land. Some land was indeed bought up by jews, who were considered exploiters of the less fortunate. Many of the uprooted Afrikaners tried to find employment in the towns, where they came into direct competition with the upwardly mobile jews, who were mostly already urbanized and busily carving out a niche for themselves" (Leveson 1996: 17).

Crude xenophobia was reinforced by the fact that the Jewish immigrants of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were most of them Yiddish-speaking, many of them impoverished, and wearing the distinctive clothes of eastern European religiously observant Jews. In 1902 the Immigration Restriction Act was passed, excluding anyone who could not sign his name in European script--this was interpreted as excluding speakers of Yiddish who used Hebrew characters. In 1906 the act was modified to define Yiddish as a European language, but the general sense of the white community that Jews were in some way "different" and threatening did not abate.

South African antisemitism from 1914 onwards increasingly paralleled European antisemitism in its growth and attitudes. In the 1930s and early 40s there was considerable pressure from right-wing organizations and Cabinet colleagues on the then prime minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, to pass legislation which severely restricted or banned altogether Jewish immigration. Smuts himself, according to his friend and biographer, the Jewish writer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, was willing, even anxious, to support the interests of South African Jews in any way he could, but white opinion was against him, especially Afrikaner opinion--and he depended on the support of the Afrikaners. Millin writes of the wife of a member of Smuts's cabinet who said to her, "You should tell Jews not to make themselves prominent and seek public positions. You know what times are. It isn't liked when Jews are prominent. It isn't liked...in the Cabinet" (1955:122). This warning was aimed at Millin's husband, the able and deserving lawyer Ph ilip Millin, whose appointment to the judiciary was delayed for years (as Smuts himself admitted) because of the fact that he was Jewish.

"This is a long preamble of a tale." Like the Wife of Bath, however, I wish to argue for its relevance, since the history of the Jewish community in South Africa has been one which, even more than the histories of the communities of the Diaspora in Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia, has obliged its members to think of themselves as "different," and not primarily or most importantly as religiously different. The "melting pot" concept, so vital in the United States, and influential in many other lands, has never been popular in South Africa. The politically dominant white groups insisted on the "difference" of other groups, African, Indian, minority European groups like Greeks and Portuguese, and especially Jews. Black people were, of course, held in permanent "difference" by their appearance. Greeks and Portuguese, since they were at least Christians, might hope for eventual assimilation--Pereira and Ferreira are nowadays common Afrikaans names. But the jews, who were in any case ambivalent ab out their "difference," valuing it as much as they hated it, were much more difficult to assimilate.

I do not want to undervalue the injustices suffered professionally by Jews like Philip Millin, or socially by many others, when I say that the Jew's ability to define himself or herself as different in several ways from the rest of the white population of South Africa may well be the reason for the great achievements of South African Jews in the field of literature. With great regret, I shall confine myself here almost entirely to writers of fiction, despite the claims on my attention of Jewish poets like Sidney Clouts, Bernard Levinson, Ruth Miller, Karen Press, Helen Segal, Lewis Sowden, and many others. One poet, Olga Kirsch, has been included because the linguistic choice which she made was both interesting and unusual.

Let us look at three of the most distinguished South African Jewish novelists: Nadine Gordimer (1923- ), Nobel Prize winner and as Stephen Clingman has called her, the writer of South African "history from the inside" (1986:1-20), Dan Jacobson (1929-), absent from South Africa since 1954, but still preoccupied with the country of his birth, and Sarah Gertrude Millin (1889-1968) whose long series of novels, short stories, and biographies was published from 1919 to 1965.

These three seem to me to represent some of the choices available to South African Jews-there are other choices with which I shall deal briefly later. To begin with Gordimer, since her fame seems to demand it: she has frequently used of herself the phrase "a white African" (1990:275), defining this identity not only as a Jewish choice, but as a choice to be made by every white who wishes to remain resident in this country. It was a choice that she made and explored early in her career as a writer. Having made the "white African" choice, is Gordimer still a Jewish South African writer? By no means a Zionist, she has explained that she had no religious and little cultural education as a Jew (Bazin and Seymour 1990:117; 249). She nevertheless says, "I,m Jewish but have never had any kind of Jewish upbringing; I have never been to a synagogue except for a wedding, et cetera. In fact, I read the Bible as literature when I was growing up" (Bazin and Seymour 1990: 194).

While I do not wish here to revive or extend the "What is a Jew?" debate, I acknowledge that the best known South African Jewish writers have been secular, and that we can only identify Jews and appreciate their choices as Jewish choices by using the ancient criterion that the child of a Jewish mother is a Jew. Gordimer's mother, as she has admitted, was only just a Jew, despising her father for his roots in Lithuania (Bazin and Seymour 1990:247-248). What seems to have been more problematic for Gordimer was that as a child she knew no Jews whose experience of injustice had made them compassionate towards blacks: "... my father had, during his childhood, suffered from a form of apartheid. But he never drew a parallel between the two situations. Born a Lithuanian Jew, he had nevertheless lived under Russian domination which denied Jewish children the right to go to the same schools as the others or to attend the university. My father arrived in South Africa at age 13 totally uneducated. His attitude was not mu ch different than that of the immigrants who arrive in South Africa today--Italians, Germans, French. They are hardly there three weeks before they adopt all the behavior and prejudices of the white supremacists" (Bazin and Seymour 1990: 118).

Gordimer's difficulties with the Jewish immigrant who feels nothing for the oppressed are manifest in her "trade store" short stories, published in her early volume The Soft Voice of the Serpent. In stories like "A Present for a Good Girl," "The Umbilical Cord" and "The Defeated" she reflects on the callousness of the storekeeper towards his clients--and the damage that his child does to himself when he rejects and despises him. Gordimer has tended to experiment within her short stories with situations and characters which are more fully explored in her novels. The stories of The Soft Voice of the Serpent were followed by her first novel, The Lying Days, in which Joel, a young Jew, has solved his problems of attitude towards his parents, who keep a trade store. He advises Helen, the heroine: "There is that in you that is them, and it's that unkillable fibre of you that will hurt you and pull you off balance wherever you run to--unless you accept it. Accept them in you, accept them as they are, even if you you rself choose to live differently, and you'll be all right. Funnily enough, that's the only way to be free of them" (1983: 153).

In The Lying Days Gordimer takes as her heroine a young English-speaking girl who grows up absorbing the prejudices of her fellow whites in a small mining town on the Rand. Helen leaves as a young adult for Johannesburg but finds that she can commit herself to none of the choices available to liberal whites there. The novel offers Joel, Gordimer's most detailed and sympathetic presentation of a Jew, whom Helen is prevented by his "difference" from ever considering as a lover.

Next in the order of Gordimer's novels comes A World of Strangers, in which her hero, Toby, tries to live in a multiracial Johannesburg. The novel commemorates the world of Drum, the magazine for black readers which in the 50s and 60s employed the first considerable group of black writers. Occasion for Loving and The Late Bourgeois World, the latter a favorite with me, portray the failure of the liberal ideal of a just society founded on the personal choices of people of goodwill. In The Late Bourgeois

World, Gordimer introduces her preoccupation with the marginalization of whites in the struggle towards democracy, which is to be a central theme of one of her greatest works, Burger's Daughter. A Sport of Nature contains Gordimer's most sustained and critical portrait of a Jewish family in Johannesburg, and in None to Accompany Me she appears to pay a long-standing debt to the feminist movement, which she has in the past seen as a white middle class self-indulgence (TLS 15 August 1980). What is important is that Gordimer's oeuvre, read as a chronological whole, forms a coherent account of Apartheid as experienced by a middle-class white person.

Dan Jacobson's achievement as a Jewish South African writer appears at first sight very different: since 1954 his permanent home has been in London, and in his highly productive life of novel, short story, and review writing, only a part of his attention has been focused on South Africa. The South African part of his oeuvre has however been a significant one in the whole corpus of South African writing in this century, as I shall demonstrate, and his choice to leave South Africa and comment on it from a distance has been, if not a purely Jewish one, one which has been more open and attractive to Jews than to some other groups in South Africa. Jacobson has written ruefully about his consciousness as an adolescent of the "difference" between his parents and the people of English descent in his home town, Kimberley:

It was not just that [the Pallings] celebrated Christmas and Easter, while we celebrated Passover and Yom Kippur. My parents spoke with a foreign accent; the Palling parents did not. Mr Palling was in employment as the chartered secretary of the local branch of a building society; my father managed his own business. The Palling parents called each other "Mother" and "Father"; mine did not. Mr Palling went every Sunday morning in a white shirt, white flannel trousers, and a blazer, to play bowls at the local club; my father did not. The Pallings' house was clean and orderly; ours was not. My parents discussed politics endlessly--local politics, Zionist politics, the war in Europe; the Palling parents never did. Our house was full of books and newspapers, and we were constantly going to the town library; the Pallings' house was altogether bare of reading matter. I and my brothers did well at school; the Palling boys did not. We argued with our parents; the Pallings did not. (Jacobson 1964: 76-77)

What Jacobson is describing is an intellectual and, even more, a critical tradition embodied in the relationships within a family; this tradition is to be an important part of his choice to be a writer. His parents maintain an intellectual involvement with European politics, as well as with Zionism: the young Jacobson spent two years on a kibbutz before settling in Britain. And if the Pallings are to be seen as a thoroughly conformist English speaking South African couple, at least in the externals of their lives, the Jacobsons, it is clear, are not. Their children may stay in South Africa or they may go elsewhere, but their relationship to any national ethos will be a critical one.

Two early novellas, published in London in 1956, give a compelling sense of this critical spirit, which in Jacobson's writings is always combined with compassion. They are The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, and both have as their subject the terrible relationship between white master and black servant. I have called this relationship elsewhere a post-slavery phenomenon (Lenta 1996: 89-104) because it is based on the definition of the servant as abjectly inferior because of his race group, and the master as superior for the same reason. The master apparently has immense power over the servant, and the latter is obliged apparently to acquiesce; but in fact both are aware of the master's equal dependence on their relationship, and the slave will use deception of many kinds to maintain his power over his master.

I have commented earlier that Jacobson has written what amounts to an introduction to postcolonialism: in A Dance in the Sun he anticipates postcolonial writing by giving to his narrator a wonderfully imagined hatred of his situation as colonist and longing for the "homeland" he has never seen: "It was a kind of homesickness, I felt then, but it was a sickness for a home I had never had, for a single cultivated scene, for a country less empty and violent, for people whose manners and skins were fitted peaceably together...--a multi-tongued nation of nomads we seemed to be, across a country too big and silent for us, too dry for cultivation, about which we went on roads like chains. We were caught within it, within this wide, sad land we mined but did not cultivate" (1985: 140-141).

Jacobson's frequent subject in his early days was the lives of whites, especially Jews, in Kimberley, which he often calls Lyndhurst: Beggar My Neighbour: Short Stories and Inklings are volumes which contain stories of this kind. The short story "Beggar My Neighbour" is one of the most haunting accounts of what it means to live in comfort yet in proximity to the destitute.

As in the case of Gordimer, I cannot give space to a list of the titles of Jacobson's works, but will draw attention to those which I think remain of interest to readers who wish to understand life in South Africa. The Confessions of Josef Baisz deals with life in a corrupt and totalitarian state, and Jacobson's interest in South African politics of the period is obviously a strong influence. Time and Time Again (1985) is a volume of autobiographical pieces, of which about half are set in Kimberley and which catch the flavor of small town South Africa.

Two recent works, The Electronic Elephant and Heshel's Kingdom are interesting because though they possess South African elements, they are evidently post-Apartheid. South Africans as well as the people of the northern hemisphere have asked themselves what might characterize their literature after the great theme of opposition to Apartheid has moved into the past: The Electronic Elephant asserts that the greater theme of colonialism is by no means dead. It deals with Jacobson's journey along the road through the north of the Cape Province, Botswana, and Zimbabwe which he tells us was variously known as "the missionary road," "the hunters' trail," "the traders' road" and "the road to the north" (1995: 1). At the height of the imperialist dream it was seen as the beginning of a great Cape-to-Cairo-route, and Jacobson's journey along it has the purpose of finding out what became of all these versions of the colonial impulse. The work is highly personal; there is no sense of a final verdict on the remnants of col onialism.

Heshel's Kingdom is also personal and involved with colonialism, but very differently. It takes as its point of origin the author's grandfather, Rabbi Heshel Melamed, whom Jacobson has never seen, since he died in middle age in Lithuania before Jacobson's birth. This death freed Heshel's wife and children to emigrate to South Africa and to escape the approaching Holocaust. Heshel himself, who had visited the United States and knew what happened to Jewish families who settled there, was strongly opposed to any idea of emigration. Had he not died, Jacobson knows that he himself, born in Johannesburg, and the other descendants of Heshel alive today would not have existed. The death of their grandfather gave them not only existence, but choices--choices like those Heshel had seen exercised in America and which he deplored. Jacobson records the variety of lifestyles they have embraced: religious Jew, secular Jew, white South African, Englishman, and the rest. He tells what little he knows of Heshel's life and deat h, and of his family's arrival and life in South Africa. Even more striking, however, is his account of a journey he makes with his son to Lithuania to try to discover what happened to the Jewish people of Varnai (Vorna to the Jews who lived there) and other thriving communities: apart from a handful of sad survivors, they are gone almost as though they had never been.

Sarah Gertrude Millin's work now seems so remote from us that despite the fact that she lived till 1968, she seems to belong to a different century from Gordimer and Jacobson. Yet her best work remains compelling, though disconcerting. The novelist and critic J M Coetzee, in his essay "Blood, Taint, Flaw and Degeneration: The Novels of Sarah Gertrude Millin" calls Millin "certainly the most substantial novelist writing in English in South Africa between Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, neglected nowadays because her treatment of race has come to seem dated and even morally offensive" (1988:138).

Only one work by Millin has been republished in the recent past: it is God's Stepchildren, which appeared in 1986 with an introduction by Tony Voss. The book had appeared originally in 1924, when the social Darwinism of her views was already out of date, though it had not turned into the horrible curiosity which it has appeared to be since the end of World War II. Voss summarizes its thesis (and it is most markedly a roman a these) as "weak and misguided white men have mated with idle and sensual brown women" (1986:8). He goes on to note that "[o]ther races are referred to in terms of stereotype and caricature: "the grotesque development which was the Hottentot ideal of beauty" ... "a bow-legged Indian." The bottom of the hierarchy of races is with the "aboriginal," near to the African earth" (1986:8-9). Offspring of unions between members of different racial groups are seen by Millin as doomed to degeneracy, and she traces this degeneracy relentlessly through four generations of the descendants of the missio nary Andrew Flood, who marries a Hottentot girl.

Millin is not merely a rather late adherent of Social Darwinism; she remained stubbornly unconvinced by evidence that racism was an evil. In the aftermath of World War II, when, as Coetzee remarks, the revelations which occurred in the course of the Nuremberg trials seemed to have made such discourse impossible (1989: 136), she published two novels which affirmed her belief that unions between people of different races must produce degenerate offspring, King of the Bastards and The Burning Man. Both seem to me unattractive costume dramas, permeated by a belief in that the activities of missionaries are necessarily damaging. In the 60s she became convinced that Verwoerd's Apartheid policies offered the ideology that South Africa needed. Indeed, her earlier autobiographical work, The Measure of My Days, in which her friendship with Smuts is an important topic, reveals her belief that white civilization is precious, fragile, and must at all costs--the costs, it is understood, will be paid by black people--be preserved. She nevertheless considered herself a staunch anti-Nazi and both she and her husband were Zionists, at least in a theoretical sense.

Leveson tries to understand these contradictions by quoting Lavinia Braun's claim that Millin felt "a deep-felt compassion for the victims of conflict caused by racial differences" and suggests that her "stepchild-like status as a Jewess in South Africa" "leads her to a sympathetic identification with the pain and shame experienced by other members of minority groups" (1996: 78). My own view is not so generous: there is no doubt that Millin feels sympathy for persons of mixed race, or for those whom she believes to be of inferior races, but she does not identify with them. She sees what Coetzee calls "the community's edict of expulsion" (1998: 51) passed on people of mixed race as terrible but necessary, a verdict which is far from that which she passed on the antisemitism of the 30s in South Africa. She quotes with approval Smuts's warning to "white South Africa to 'have a care lest some day little brown children play among the ruins of the Union Government buildings"' (1955: 134).

More important, no doubt, than the opinions to which she tended in her autobiographical work is that all Millin's fictional texts show an ambivalence towards black people. Her volume of short stories, Two Bucks without Hair, since it focuses on the lives of black people and consists of two groups of stories, maybe used to exemplify this. Part I is entitled "Murders" and contains four longish stories; Part II, "Alita," consists of shorter sketches and centers on the narrator's maid and her family.

All the stories in Part I are concerned with the lives of black people in rural settings, outside of the white economy. They show such people experiencing love, jealousy, hatred--emotions common to everyone, but here resulting in mortal conflict Some of the black men and women serve their own interests as they see them, some have a sense of morality and of honor which leads them to sacrifice themselves for the common good. Yet the tone of the (non-figural) narrator frequently indicates that these people are "primitive": admirable at times, at times base, but fated to move in their behavior pattems between the noble and the brutish savage.

The "Alita" stories are based on the woman who really was Millin's maid, and for whom Millin felt both affection and admiration. Here her pity for black people and her belief that they must be "primitive" in all their actions and reactions is clear, but perhaps because the stories derive from the actions of a real woman, she cannot refrain from showing Alita to be noble, even at times heroic, though she is childish enough to long for a black shawl with fringes to wear on Sundays. In one of the stories, "Why Adonis Laughed," Alita merely tells the story to the frame narrator. It concerns two Griquas, David and Dinah, who long to marry, though David has to save for years to pay bride price. Shortly after the marriage Dinah gives birth to a baby which is obviously of mixed race, and admits that the child's father is her white employer. This kind of story has often been told in South African texts: Alan Paton in Too Late the Phalarope, Mtutulezi Matshoba in Call Me Not a Man, Lauretta Ngcobo in And They Didn't Di e are only three of the authors who have discussed the white employer who rapes or seduces his black employee. Millin, however, unlike these three, offers no interpretation of what has happened--David is simply laughed at. Work out if you can what is happening here.

It is tempting to regard Millin with hindsight as the embodiment of an embarrassing mistake made by some Jewish South Africans. She longed for acceptance and for advancement into the ruling elite, as her autobiographical writings make clear. In order to achieve this, did she sink her own better judgment and embrace the ideology of white supremacy? My own theory is that she made what was at the time an impossible combination of choices--to be a white South African, to be a member of the ruling group, to be a Jew and a Zionist.

These three figures may stand as examples of the choices of the literary Jew but the reality, of course, is that many other writers have made their own choices, variants and different combinations of those made by those whom I shall venture to call the three greats. No reviewer could, in the space available to me here, possibly claim to be exhaustive in her listings, and I must insist that I am not attempting a full roll-call of Jewish writers nor even of Jewish writers of fiction, to whom I shall largely confine myself. Readers will not find here the name and work of their talented cousin who in 1908 published, privately, a slender volume, though my list must be individual and perhaps quirky. Olga Kirsch is an example of a writer whose choice may be compared in one respect with that of Sarah Gertrude Millin, since she combined an overt "South Africanness" with Zionism. Her choice--and it was a choice--of Afrikaans as the language of her poetry, and the fact that she continued to write in that language long after she herself had emigrated to Israel in 1949, may be understood as an assertion that the language did not belong to the political party which had appropriated it, but was simply a major South African language. She may be described as a major-minor Afrikaans poet, publishing collections in 1994 (Die soeklig), 1948 (Mure van die Hart), followed by a literary silence of over 20 years. In the 1970s she resumed publication: Negentien gedigte apeared in 1972, Geil gebied in 1976, Oorwinteraans in die vremde in 1978, and Afskeide in 1982.

Kirsch often makes use of images drawn from the Torah, and deals with the history of the Jewish people and the Zionist hopes of her early life, but one of the most attractive of her poems contrasts her own comfort and relative affluence with the abject poverty of a black South African child. In her later poetry the life of contemporary Israel is at times a subject; other poems recall her life in South Africa and contrast the two periods and two countries of residence. She is specially distinguished as a writer of sonnets, but her greatest gift to Afrikaans may well lie in the fact that she imported new attitudes and subject matter into the literature.

Two names of Jews whose work for others as well as themselves has been vital on the South African literary scene come to mind: Lionel Abrahams and Barney Simon. Both have been distinguished writers themselves, but are equally eminent for the encouragement and practical help which they have offered to fledgling writers. Abrahams began his literary life as the editor of the stories of Herman Charles Bosman, one of South Africa's most distinguished writers, many of whose tales had appeared only in magazines by the time of his death in 1951. Since then, Abrahams has edited six volumes of Bosman's work. Renoster Books, a publishing house founded by Abrahams, was the first to publish, in the early seventies, the poetry of the now well-known black poets Oswald Mtshali and Mongane Wally Serote. Abrahams is himself a poet, and has also written a book of short stories, The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan.

Barney Simon began his writing life as a journalist and has written a lively book of short stories, Joburg, Sis! His most important sphere of work is however the theater, and besides adapting his and other writers' stories for the stage, he has been an early producer of Athol Fugard's work. Simon had an important role as patron and editor in the production of Dugmore Boetie's Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost: The Story of a Black Man in South Africa, one of the earliest and most interesting of black autobiographical works in South Africa, and he has collaborated in the writing and production of many plays, notably Woza Albert.

Two writers of the fifties whose work was strongly motivated by their need to protest against racial injustice were Phyllis Altman, whose The Law of the Vultures appeared in 1952 and was republished in 1987, and Harry Bloom, whose Episode in the Transvaal was published in 1956. Both these writers still deserve attention, commemorating as they do important events in the process of resistance against Apartheid.

Jillian Becker's novels, thoroughly minor work though they are, have some interest for another reason. Leveson has identified them as characterized by "Jewish self-rejection" (1996: 190-193), manifest in this case in an angry and contemptuous sense of the middle class Jewish community of Johannesburg. Becker does not always identify her characters as Jewish: in her first novel, The Keep (1967), it is clear that the family is an upwardly mobile Jewish one, but in The Virgins (1976), the parents, especially the mother, are simply callous and materialistic--their religious group is unimportant. The phenomenon which strikes the reader in Becker's work however, is that which locates evil (social, economic, familial) in the older generation, and especially in older women, and it is one which is common in South African writing, including Gordimer's texts. A more interesting critical analysis of Jewish family life and how it shapes children is offered by Lyndall Gordon, whose Shared Lives looks at a group of Jewish girls, the second generation of their families in South Africa, as they grow up and struggle with their families' hopes for them and their own ambitions.

Rose Zwi's South African fiction is more overtly historical in its intentions: the present writer remembers a friend's comment that Another Year in Africa (1980), the first of a cycle of three works, was about her grandparents. The cover of the novel makes it clear that a real community, that of the impoverished Lithuanian immigrants in Johannesburg in the 1930s, is the novelist's subject. The conflicts and hopes, successes and failures of the individuals are handled with compassion.

The trendy success of Antony Sher's first novel, Middlepost (1988) (two later works have been less successful) deserves notice. Sher concealed the fact that he was South African for many years, having left the country when he was nineteen for a distinguished career in acting in Britain. His novel, which was published in the year when he went public as South African, deals with a "holy fool," a Jewish immigrant of 1902 who, like many of his kind, becomes a smous (peddler) and encounters on his travels members of all the race groups resident in the subcontinent. Jewishness (in the form of caricatures of Jews) is equally a subject with racism, and readers with strong stomachs may well find this an interesting work.

A final group which has to be noticed is that of Jews whose choices have been extreme and heroic, who have suffered imprisonment and exile, or who have commemorated those who have done so. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela comments "...in my experience I have found Jews to be more broadminded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice" (1994:66). Though, as I hope I have demonstrated in this review. South Africa's Jews have been as diverse as any other group in their opinions, a substantial number of them have left records of lives devoted to the struggle for freedom. Once again, I can only give a tiny sample, but I suggest that Ruth First's 117 Days (1982), Albie Sachs's The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1990), and Gillian Slovo's Ties of Blood (1990) might be good introductions to this genre. Ties of Blood, dealing with the lifestyle forced upon the children of revolutionaries, makes an interesting compan ion piece to Gordimer's Burger's Daughter.

In the last 20 years, the Jewish community of South Africa has been shrinking in numbers. Many of the writers to whom I have referred have left this country and will never again be permanent residents here. After the 1948 election which brought the Nationalist Party to power and inaugurated 40 yeas of apartheid, the outflow began, Dan Jacobson being one of the earliest Jewsih writers to leave. The violence and economic decline of the 1980s and the political uncertainty of the 1990s caused further white emigration. Jews, many of whom maintained family ties with people in America, Britain, and Australia, tended to be better able than most other whites to change countries. At the present time affirmative action employment policies, which are applied in government service and universities as well as elsewhere, work to disadvantage young whites, especially men. It is becoming clearer that in the long term, all white South Africans who wish to remain will have to make the "white African" choice which Gordimer has advocated; that is to say, Jewish South Africans may be obliged to abandon the "difference" between themselves and the larger South African community which in the past they have valued. The ties with Europe, America, and Israel which many have inherited must be weakened, and they must accept that if they remain in South Africa, their economic and cultural fate will be bound up with that of their compatriots. The need to make such choices may well bring about a contraction in the ranks of South African Jewish writers, as well as a greater uniformity in their political opinions: only those who accept that their strongest loyalty is to Africa will remain. ButJewish writing from the days of diversity and acrimonious political controversy will, I hope, remain as evidence of Jewish reaction and counter-reaction to the bitter debates of South Africa in this century.

MARGARET LENTA is an honorary research associate in the School of Graduate Studies, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Natal, Durban. Her research interests are eighteenth-century fiction, diaries and letters, and twentieth-century South African fiction.

FROM ALL THEIR HABITATIONS takes its title from Ezekiel 37:23 and features reports of Jewish religions, intellectual, and communal life in various parts of the world.

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