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

This anthology, the fourth volume to appear in the University of Nebraska Press series "Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World," edited by Sander Gilman, presents texts by sixteen authors whom the dust jacket calls "the best and most noteworthy of a wide range of contemporary writers who represent the historical specificities and contradictions of South African Jewish life under apartheid." The volume contains an informative, if methodologically somewhat haphazard, 68-page introduction outlining the Jewish experience in South Africa from the 1920s to the present in the context of key turning points in the history of apartheid (interwoven with commentary on the anthologized texts) by its editor Claudia Bathsheba Braude, a "freelance writer," as noted on the dust jacket, who "formerly served on the editorial Board of Jewish Affairs" and "coauthored the South African Human Rights Commission Interim Report of the Inquiry into Racism in the Media."

Braude's collection of texts is informed by the hope that it "will restore memory to a racial history that is largely forgotten in both popular and critical reception" (xi). Tracing the individual experience and awareness of such a complex, often elusive history within the larger history of apartheid is no easy task, and in her effort to be as inclusive as possible, Braude has cast a wide net to accommodate "different writerly strategies" on a "spectrum from collusion with racism and apartheid to involvement in the struggle for a nonracial society" (x). However different their "strategies," Braude argues that the writers under consideration find themselves "positioned" within South African history and politics in such a way as to allow this collection of their work to be considered "'Jewish' fiction not because its authors are biologically Jewish but because it illuminates a specific convergence of issues around race, identity, memory, and history" (x).

The question as to how one might organize a collection of such disparate texts from the 1950s to the present is a difficult one. Rather than proceeding chronologically according to first publication date, categorically according to genre (among others the literary story, novel chapter, forms of the essay, documentation, memoir, and cartoon-like humor are represented here), or by way of a theoretical schema, Braude follows a chronological sequence based on the respective historical era considered in the individual works. Her intention is plausible: she wants to establish a historic-thematic arsenal of cultural memory that emerges via the data embedded in the literary material she has at her disposal. Accordingly, the collection begins with an excerpt from Rose Zwi's novel Another Year in Africa of 1980 about Jewish life in the early part of the century, followed by "My Father Leaves Home," Nadine Gordimer's story of 1991 about emigration from Lithuania at that same time; it then presents midway a story from Lionel Abrahams's The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan (1977), evocative of the author's childhood and youth in South Africa at the time of the Third Reich in Germany, followed by Maja Kriel's story "Number 1-4642443-0" (1993), suggestive of that time; and ends with texts by the ANC lawyer and activist Albie Sachs, "now a judge on the Constitutional Court" (xiii), as well as the writers Graeme Friedman and Matthew Krouse, concerned with events in South Africa just before and since the end of apartheid.

The quality of the writing is uneven (to me, the anthologized texts authored by Gordimer, Abrahams, Sachs, and Dan Jacobson were by far the most powerful), and because of this, as well as the juxtaposition of historically, politically, and stylistically incongruous texts, the sequencing had a jarring effect on me as I read through the collection. For example, reading Gordimer's subtly differentiated fusion of modernism and realism on the heels of Rose Zwi's somewhat belabored version of social realism had the effect of diminishing the...