Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer (20 November 192313 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity". and Hannah "Nan" ( Myers) Gordimer (1897–1973), a British Jewish immigrant from London. Her father was raised with an Orthodox Jewish education before immigrating with his family to South Africa at the age of 13. Her mother was not religiously observant, and mostly assimilated, whereas her father maintained a membership of the local Orthodox synagogue and attended once a year for the Yom Kippur services.

Family background

Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents. Her father's experience as a refugee from Tsarist Russia helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid. Conversely, Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa led her to found a crèche for black children. Her first published work was a short story for children, "The Quest for Seen Gold", which appeared in the Children's Sunday Express in 1937; "Come Again Tomorrow", another children's story, appeared in Forum around the same time. At the age of 16, she had her first adult fiction published.

Career

Gordimer studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she mixed for the first time with fellow professionals across the colour bar. She also became involved in the Sophiatown renaissance. beginning a long relationship, and bringing Gordimer's work to a much larger public. Gordimer, who said she believed the short story was the literary form for our age, Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953.

Activism and professional life

The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre spurred Gordimer's entry into the anti-apartheid movement. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, she was one of the first people he wanted to see. In 1973, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee.

During this time, the South African government banned several of her works, two for lengthy periods of time. The Late Bourgeois World was Gordimer's first personal experience with censorship; it was banned in 1976 for a decade by the South African government. A World of Strangers was banned for twelve years. Gordimer responded to this decision in Essential Gesture (1988), pointing out that the board banned two books by black authors at the same time it unbanned her own work. Gordimer's subsequent novels escaped censorship under apartheid. In 2001, a provincial education department temporarily removed July's People from the school reading list, along with works by other anti-apartheid writers, describing July's People as "deeply racist, superior and patronising"—a characterisation that Gordimer took as a grave insult, and that many literary and political figures protested. While never blindly loyal to any organisation, Gordimer saw the ANC as the best hope for reversing South Africa's treatment of black citizens. Rather than simply criticising the organisation for its perceived flaws, she advocated joining it to address them. which noted that Gordimer "through her magnificent epic writing has—in the words of Alfred Nobel—been of very great benefit to humanity".

Gordimer's activism was not limited to the struggle against apartheid. She resisted censorship and state control of information, and fostered the literary arts. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government. Gordimer also served on the steering committee of South Africa's Anti-Censorship Action Group. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer was also active in South African letters and international literary organisations. She was Vice President of International PEN.

In the post-apartheid 1990s and 21st century, Gordimer was active in the HIV/AIDS movement, addressing a significant public health crisis in South Africa. In 2004, she organised about 20 major writers to contribute short fiction for Telling Tales, a fundraising book for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for government funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. On this matter, she was critical of the South African government, noting in 2004 that she approved of everything President Thabo Mbeki had done except his stance on AIDS.

In 2005, Gordimer went on lecture tours and spoke on matters of foreign policy and discrimination beyond South Africa. For instance, in 2005, when Fidel Castro fell ill, Gordimer joined six other Nobel prize winners in a public letter to the United States warning it not to seek to destabilise Cuba's communist government. Gordimer's resistance to discrimination extended to her even refusing to accept "shortlisting" in 1998 for the Orange Prize, because the award recognizes only women writers. Gordimer also taught at the Massey College of the University of Toronto as a lecturer in 2006.

She was a vocal critic of the ANC government's Protection of State Information Bill, publishing a lengthy condemnation in The New York Review of Books in 2012.

Personal life

Gordimer had a daughter, Oriane (born 1950), by her first marriage in 1949 to Gerald Gavron (Gavronsky), a local dentist, from whom she was divorced within three years. Gordimer also spent time with her family in France, as she and Cassirer had bought a small hilltop home near Nice.

In a 1979-80 interview Gordimer, who was Jewish, identified as an atheist, but added: "I think I have a basically religious temperament, perhaps even a profoundly religious one." She was not involved in Jewish communal life, though both her husbands were Jewish. In a 1996 interview she said: "The only time I seriously enquired into religion was in my mid-thirties, when I experienced a strange kind of loss or lack in myself and thought this may be because I had no religion."

Gordimer did not believe that being from an oppressed people was the reason that she was engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle: "I get rather annoyed when people suggest that my engagement in the anti-apartheid struggle can somehow be traced back to my Jewishness... I refuse to accept that one must oneself have been exposed to prejudice and exploitation to be opposed to it. I like to think that all decent people, whatever their religious or ethnic background, have an equal responsibility to fight what is evil. To say otherwise is to concede too much." Gordimer could be critical of Israel, but rejected comparison of its policies to apartheid in South Africa.

Until the end of her life, she lived in the same Herbert Baker-designed home in Parktown in Johannesburg for over five decades. In 2006, Gordimer was attacked in her home by robbers, sparking outrage in the country. Gordimer apparently refused to move into a gated complex, against the advice of some friends. Although her children and grandchildren lived overseas and friends had emigrated, she had no plans to leave South Africa permanently: "It's always been a nightmare in my mind, to be cut off." Suresh subsequently criticised Gordimer for her decision and her stances on other issues.

Works, themes, and reception

Gordimer achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as well as the "moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country." Virtually all of Gordimer's works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices. Her characterisation is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs. She also weaves in subtle details within the characters' names.

In 1985, writing in The New York Times, Joseph Lelyveld observed that whilst she achieved great acclaim overseas, reactions to her work in her native South Africa were "mixed":

In her 1963 work, Occasion for Loving, Gordimer puts apartheid and love squarely together. Her protagonist, Ann Davis, is married to Boaz Davis, an ethnomusicologist, but in love with Gideon Shibalo, an artist with several failed relationships. Davis is white, however, and Shibalo is black, and South Africa's government criminalised such relationships.

Gordimer collected the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Guest of Honour in 1971 and, in common with a number of winners of this award, she was to go on to win the Booker Prize. The Booker was awarded to Gordimer for her 1974 novel, The Conservationist, and was a co-winner with Stanley Middleton's novel Holiday. The Conservationist explores Zulu culture and the world of a wealthy white industrialist through the eyes of Mehring, the antihero. Per Wästberg described The Conservationist as Gordimer's "densest and most poetical novel".

In July's People (1981), she imagines a bloody South African revolution, in which white people are hunted and murdered after blacks revolt against the apartheid government. The work follows Maureen and Bamford Smales, an educated white couple, hiding for their lives with July, their long-time former servant. The novel plays off the various groups of "July's people": his family and his village, as well as the Smales. The story examines how people cope with the terrible choices forced on them by violence, race hatred, and the state.

The House Gun (1998) was Gordimer's second post-apartheid novel. It follows the story of a couple, Claudia and Harald Lingard, dealing with their son Duncan's murder of one of his housemates. The novel treats the rising crime rate in South Africa and the guns that virtually all households have, as well as the legacy of South African apartheid and the couple's concerns about their son's lawyer, who is black. The novel was optioned for film rights to Granada Productions.

Gordimer's award-winning 2002 novel, The Pickup, considers the issues of displacement, alienation, and immigration; class and economic power; religious faith; and the ability for people to see, and love, across these divides. It tells the story of a couple: Julie Summers, a white woman from a financially secure family, and Abdu, an illegal Arab immigrant in South Africa. After Abdu's visa is refused, the couple returns to his homeland, where she is the alien. Her experiences and growth as an alien in another culture form the heart of the work.

Get a Life, written in 2005 after the death of her long-time spouse, Reinhold Cassirer, is the story of a man undergoing treatment for a life-threatening disease. While clearly drawn from personal life experiences, the novel also continues Gordimer's exploration of political themes. The protagonist is an ecologist, battling installation of a planned nuclear plant. But he is at the same time undergoing radiation therapy for his cancer, causing him personal grief and, ironically, rendering him a nuclear health hazard in his own home. Here, Gordimer again pursues the questions of how to integrate everyday life and political activism.

Jewish themes and characters

Gordimer has occasionally given voice to Jewish characters, rituals and themes in her short stories and novels.

Kenneth Bonert, writing in The Forward, expressed the view that Jewish identity was rarely explored in her work: "For all of her Jewish heritage and personal connections (not only were her parents and family Jews, so were both of her husbands), overt signs of Jewishness are largely absent from her body of work. It's impossible to guess from the books alone that Gordimer was Jewish; and it would be easy to assume the contrary, since whenever Jews do appear in her fiction, they tend to be seen through the eyes of a non-Jew, looking in with almost anthropological fascination onto an alien culture."

Benjamin Ivry, writing in The Forward, highlighted several examples where Gordimer employed Jewish characters and themes: "Gordimer proved that indeed anything was possible when examining the personal significance of Yiddishkeit." It centres on the death of a Jewish grandmother and her family observing the ritual of Shemira, as they arrange for a shomer to watch over the body from the time of death until burial.

In her debut novel The Lying Days (1953), a major character, Joel Aaron, son of a working class Jewish shopkeeper, acts as a voice of conscience. He has progressive, enlightened views about apartheid. His ethical stances and sense of Jewish identity and ancestry impresses his non-Jewish white middle-class friend, Helen: "His nature had for mine the peculiar charm of the courage to be itself without defiance." He is a Zionist and makes aliyah to Israel.

In A World of Strangers (1958), there is less Jewish character development, with only a reference to an older man at a party with a thick Eastern European accent with an attractive blonde spouse.

In 1966, Gordimer wrote an original story for The Jewish Chronicle. "The Visit" includes an extract from the Talmud and follows David Levy returning home from a Friday night Shabbat service. The story follows two Jewish sisters, Rose and Naomi Rasovsky. According to Wade: "The story's ending indicates that Gordimer has not yet broken through the wool-and-iron barriers of confusion and conflict aroused by the question of her Jewish identity."

In 1983, she published "Letter from His Father" in The London Review of Books, a response to Franz Kafka's "Letter to His Father". In the letter, Gordimer makes references to Yiddish, Yom Kippur, Aliyah, Kibbutzim and Yiddish theatre. Later in the novella, Dr Milton Caro, a Jewish pathologist, witnesses the beast from the golf course. Gordimer contrasts his distinguished medical career with his petit bourgeois upbringing: "the gruff, slow homeliness of a Jewish storekeeper's son whose early schooling was in Afrikaans."

Hillela, a Jewish South African woman, figures as the protagonist of A Sport of Nature, (1987).

In the short story "My Father Leaves Home", that appears in Jump: And Other Stories (1991), Gordimer describes an Eastern European shtetl, presumably the hometown of the title character. The anti-semitism the character faced in Europe makes him more sensitive to racism against black people in South Africa.

In her 1994 novel, None to Accompany Me, the Austrian character of Otto Abarbanel has an affair with the married protagonist, Vera Stark. Vera's husband, Bennet "Ben" correctly recognises that Abarbanel is a Sephardic Jewish surname, with the couple believing that he is Jewish. Vera believes that he is orphaned from the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Abarbanel later explains to Vera that he is not Jewish, that he is born from the Lebensborn programme and that he was later adopted by a Jewish couple of Sephardic origins and took their name.

In Gordimer's final novel No Time Like the Present (2012), one of the central characters, Stephen, is half-Jewish and married to a Zulu woman. His nephew's Bar Mitzvah prompts a meditation on his own Jewish background and he fails to grasp his brother's embrace of Judaism.

Honours and awards

Nobel Prize in Literature

Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 as the first South African and the first African female author. She had been nominated for the prize several years earlier from 1972 to 1974 by Swedish Academy member Artur Lundkvist. In 1974 she was shortlisted by the Nobel committee for a shared prize with Doris Lessing, and shortlisted again as one of the final five candidates for the 1975 prize.

Other awards and honours

W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award for Friday's Footprint (1961)
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Guest of Honour (1972)
Grand Aigle d'Or (France) (1975)
Orange Prize shortlist; she declined
Rome Prize (1984)
Premio Malaparte (Italy) (1985)
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for A Sport of Nature (1988)
Inducted as an honorary member into Phi Beta Kappa (1988)
Central News Agency Literary Award for My Son's Story (1990)
Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book from Africa for The Pickup (2002)
Booker Prize longlist for The Pickup (2001)
Officier of the Legion of Honour (2007)
American Philosophical Society, Member (2008)
American Academy of Arts and Letters, Honorary Member (1979)
Congress of South African Writers, Patron
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Commander
Order of the Aztec Eagle

Films

In 1962, a Danish film adaptation of Gordimer's novel A World of Strangers, was released under the title Dilemma by Danish film director, Henning Carlsen, and starring Ivan Jackson, Evelyn Frank, and Marijke Mann. Gordimer co-wrote the screenplay with Carlsen. The film won the Grand prize at the 1962 Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival.

In the U.K. this film was released under the title A World of Strangers due to an unrelated U.K. crime thriller being released in the same year under the same name.

In 1982, seven of her short stories were adapted as short films for television by West German television makers. The stories included: "City Lovers"; "Six Feet of the Country"; "Country Lovers"; "Oral History"; "Praise"; "Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants" and "A Chip of Glass Ruby". Barney Simon adapted Gordimer's "Six Feet of the Country" and directed "City Lovers". All seven films were released as "The Gordimer Stories" at the Film Forum in New York City in 1983. Vincent Canby praised the films as "first rate" in The New York Times.

Following her death in 2014, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies paid tribute to her, with National Chairman Mary Kluk sharing that Gordimer was “a brave, principled woman who used her remarkable literary gifts to speak out on behalf of the oppressed in South Africa and expose the injustices to which they were subjected."

On 20 November 2015, Google celebrated her 92nd birthday with a Google Doodle.

Bibliography

Novels

The Lying Days (1953)
A World of Strangers (1958)
Occasion for Loving (1963)
The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
A Guest of Honour (1970)
The Conservationist (1974)
Burger's Daughter (1979)
July's People (1981)
A Sport of Nature (1987)
My Son's Story (1990)
None to Accompany Me (1994)
The House Gun (1998)
The Pickup (2001)
Get a Life (2005)
No Time Like the Present (2012)

Plays

The First Circle, in Six One-act Plays by South African Authors (1949)

Short fiction

Collections

Face to Face (1949)
The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952)
Six Feet of the Country (1956)
Which New Era Would That Be? (1956)
Friday's Footprint (1960)
Not for Publication (1965)
Livingstone's Companions (1970)
Selected Stories (1975)
Some Monday for Sure (1976)
No Place Like: Selected Stories (1978)
A Soldier's Embrace (1980)
Town and Country Lovers (1982), published by Sylvester & Orphanos
Something Out There (1984)
Correspondence Course and other Stories (1984)
The Moment Before the Gun Went Off (1988)
Once Upon a Time (1989)
Crimes of Conscience (1991)
Jump: And Other Stories (1991)
Why Haven't You Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972 (1992)
Something for the Time Being 1950-1972 (1992)
Loot and Other Stories (2003)
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007)
Life Times: Stories, 1952–2007 (2011)

Essays, reporting and other contributions

The Black Interpreters (1973)
What Happened to Burger's Daughter or How South African Censorship Works (1980)
The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988)
Writing and Being: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1995)
Living in Hope and History (1999)

Edited works

Telling Tales (2004)

Other

The Gordimer Stories (1981–82) – adaptations of seven short stories; she wrote screenplays for four of them
On the Mines (1973)
Lifetimes Under Apartheid (1986)
Choosing for Justice: Allan Boesak (1983) (documentary with Hugo Cassirer)
Berlin and Johannesburg: The Wall and the Colour Bar (documentary with Hugo Cassirer)

Source:

Reviews

Girdwood, Alison (1984), Gordimer's South Africa, a review of Something Out There, in Parker, Geoff (ed.), Cencrastus No. 18, Autumn 1984, p. 50,

References

External links

Short Stories by Nadine Gordimer on the Web

Nadine Gordimer

Family background

Career

Activism and professional life

Personal life

Works, themes, and reception

Jewish themes and characters

Honours and awards

Nobel Prize in Literature

Other awards and honours

Films

Bibliography

Novels

Plays

Short fiction

Collections

Essays, reporting and other contributions

Edited works

Other

Reviews

See also

References

Further reading

Brief biographies

Obituaries

Critical studies

Articles

Short reviews

Speeches and interviews

Biographies

Research archives

External links