Contemporary Jewish Writing in South Africa
Edited by Claudia Bathsheba Braude
Cape Town
David Philip 2001
Given the editorial aspiration to restore memory to South African Jewish literary and cultural history, roughly half of the stories and excerpts come from the apartheid era. Some like Dan Jacobson’s “The Zulu and the Zeide” are widely anthologized and well-known, others are less so. The inclusion of older stories is justified by the claim that while not set in contemporary South Africa they speak to contemporary South Africa. The stories elaborate on many of the important concerns in apartheid era fiction. Sarah Gertrude Millin’s “Esther’s Daughter” deals with the personal costs of racial passing. Tony Eprile’s “Letters from Doreen” engages the pathos of self-imposed exile. Lionel Abrahams’s “Cut Glass” suggests both the political constraints upon personal life and the irreducibility of the personal to the political. Matthew Krause’s “The Mythological Structure of Time” takes us tentatively into the post-apartheid era where the sharp dichotomies of race are complicated by variables of culture, sexuality and religion, offering insight into the ways in which civil society in South Africa repeats the pain of its history of exclusion while imagining the possibilities for new kinds of relationships.
The lengthy introduction to this anthology assigns itself the ambitious task of assessing “the construction of memory and racial identity in South African Jewish literary and cultural history”, believing that “it is now possible to assess the long-term impact of apartheid on Jewish identity, culture and literature”. To do so, Braude moves the reader through a complex narrative of collusion and resistance, oppression and possibility, assimilation into whiteness and preservation of Jewish specificity in the interest of her own cultural memory project. The introduction stages itself as a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission for South African Jews, and is anxious throughout whether a selection and reading of fiction can do this difficult and important cultural work.
Historiographically, this reader has a few quibbles. While rigorous in historicising an identitarian framework in relation to Jews, an extremely monolithic “Afrikaans [sic] nationalism” emerges as the enemy in Braude’s account, even though much of the anti-Semitism she documents is from periods prior to 1948, and a central paradox that she strives to explain is the growth and thriving of the South African Jewish community under apartheid. Moreover, there are no Breyten Breytenbachs or Beyers Naudés in Braude’s account. Are some identities historically constructed and thus vulnerable to cultural remembering and forgetting and some not? The introduction offers a salutary reminder that South African Jews, straddling class divides and the political spectrum, never constituted a homogenous let alone a monolithic community. The major cultural memory Braude wishes to restore historiographically is the close ties ideologically and politically between Nazi Germany and what will become the National Party government in South Africa in 1948. The implications of this restored historical memory cut both ways. On the one hand, the real fears and threats in relation to South African Jews produce greater sympathy for the attempts on the part of South African Jewry to assimilate hard and fast into apartheid-era whiteness, and on the other hand this assimilation becomes even more morally problematic given the Nazi connection. Restoring this memory exacerbates the dilemma as much as it may explain it.
The introduction is strangely silent on the cosy relations between the apartheid government and the state of Israel, an amnesia difficult to understand in a project explicitly concerned with restoring memory. These cosy relations are wittily handled in the alternately hilarious and moving excerpt from Pieter-Dirk Uys’s A Part Hate, A Part Love. Evita Bezuidenhout and her husband, Hasie, are visiting Israel: “General Dayan strode into the small kitchen. Evita’s heart jumped. Kirk Douglas in Spartacus?… ‘I’ve been explaining our problem to your husband, he said with a smile. ‘He said it was similar to yours. I didn’t realize your Afrikaners also had an Arab problem.'” One would imagine that given the close ties many South African Jews have to Israel and the support of the African National Congress for the Palestinian cause, that this would be a matter of contemporary concern. Thematically, I wonder why the utility of amnesia for forgiving, for moving on, was not explored more fully.
Braude’s selection ultimately cannot alone do the work of thinking through the impact of apartheid on South African Jewish literature and culture, and it is unlikely that any collection of fiction could accomplish this. Literature as a formalised language with the institutional constraints of publishing and so forth will always have a privileged and skewed relation to cultural memory at large, and the histories it contains, hides and reveals are necessarily partial. Nevertheless in the comprehensiveness of the bibliography and the willingness to ask tough questions, the introduction suggests important avenues for fostering public conversations on difficult topics for all South Africans interested in learning more about each other.