Contemporary Jewish Writing in South Africa: An Anthology (review)

Literature plays a significant role in shaping the collective memory of a social, ethnic, or religious group. In respect of minority groups, the role of literature is crucial in building the foundations of the group’s identity, which might be threatened by the majority. In this regard, one might expect that the literature of Jewish Southern Africa would represent the immigrants’ struggle as a religious and ethnic minority to preserve their identity on religious as well as cultural grounds. This sort of identity might be preserved linguistically through, say, Yiddish, the “mame loschen,” or to a lesser degree even Hebrew, especially in South Africa where the question of language plays a significant role in establishing an ethnic identity for every group. However, the preservation of the ethnic language is only one component of the broader issue of the cultural heritage of the group, as literature is the means for creating artistically and aesthetically the collective memory. Nevertheless, White immigrants to South Africa as a whole built their collective memory in the new land not only around the linguistic- literary heritage, but by focusing as well on other components, such as geography. Thus, for instance, John Coetzee, in his White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University, 1988), stresses the place of the South African landscape as a factor in establishing the collective memory of the White immigrants. On the other hand, one may claim that for Jewish immigrants, religion, both the practice and the ritual (the synagogue), is the most important means of preserving the group identity. And we may ask, when Jewish South African immigrants came to the new land to establish a new life, did they struggle to keep their religion? Did they employ their own language? Did they identify themselves with the new country through the land scape, as the Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichowsky observed: “A human being is merely a reflection of his/her birthplace landscape”? In short, one expects to assess the merits of the present anthology as exposing the particular concerns which were reflected in the literary material that built and shaped the Jewish South African collective memory.

The editor, Claudia Bathsheba Braude, provides a long and rich introduction that throws biographical light on the various authors whose works constitute the present collection. The biographical details are furnished with contextual political and social information which focuses mainly on a specific aspect of South African Jewry from the late nineteenth century through to the Second World War. This includes as well anti- semitism expressed by the Apartheid political movement, specifically under the Nazi influence when the Afrikaner leadership was sympathetic to Nazi Germany. Braude’s introduction presents South African Jewry as victims of antisemitism. The bitter feelings articulated by the Jews are reflected in the works collected in the anthology and presented as the literary material that shaped the collective memory of South African Jewry. Thus, the subject matter of the book is the Jew and the external society, the Jewish struggle for the recognition of equality. Nevertheless, not every story in the anthology deals with Jews or Jewish matters specifically, as the question of human discrimination based on the color of skin also occupies some of the works.

In light of the above, an inevitable question must be asked: what is Jewish literature? Is it a literature whose subject matter reflects specifically Jewish concerns irrespective of the author’s genealogy, or is Jewish literature merely any literature that is written by Jews? Braude’s introduction does not dwell on this dilemma. Nevertheless, her collection sheds light on her criteria for creating the Jewish South African canon. Basically, for her, a South African literature which touches on the question of anti- semitism, presenting the Jew as victim, renders even letters that deal with the struggle of the Jew for social acceptance kosher for inclusion in the canon of Jewish South African literature. Thus, the question of...