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Nadine Gordimer

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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".

Gordimer was one of the most honoured female writers of her generation. She received the Booker Prize for The Conservationist (1974), and the Central News Agency Literary Award for The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981).

Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She later became active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Early life

Gordimer was born to Jewish parents near Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. She was the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer (1887–1962), a Lithuanian Jews immigrant watchmaker from Žagarė (then part of the Russian Empire),

Andrew Vogel Ettin (1993). 9780813914305, University Press of Virginia. . ISBN 9780813914305

(2025). 9780195147179, Oxford University Press. . ISBN 9780195147179

and Hannah "Nan" ( Myers) Gordimer (1897–1973), a British Jewish immigrant from London.

Nadine Gordimer (1990). 9780878054459, University Press of Mississippi. . ISBN 9780878054459

Her father was raised with an Orthodox Judaism education before immigrating with his family to South Africa at the age of 13. Her mother was from an established family and came to South Africa at the age of 6 with her parents. Gordimer was raised in a Secularity household. 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.Gordimer, Nadine. A South African Childhood The New Yorker. 8 October 1954

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." A Writer's Life: Nadine Gordimer", Telegraph, 3 April 2006. 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 Day care for black children. Gordimer also witnessed government repression first-hand as a teenager; the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.

Gordimer was educated at a Catholic school convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because her mother, for "strange reasons of her own", did not put her into school (apparently, she feared that Gordimer had a weak heart). Home-bound and often isolated, she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of 13. Nadine Gordimer, Guardian Unlimited (last visited 25 January 2007). 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. Nadine Gordimer: A Sport of Nature, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

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. She did not complete her degree, but moved to Johannesburg in 1948, where she lived thereafter. While taking classes in Johannesburg, she continued to write, publishing mostly in local South African magazines. She collected many of these early stories in Face to Face, published in 1949.

In 1951, The New Yorker accepted Gordimer's story "A Watcher of the Dead", New Yorker, 9 June 1951. 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, continued to publish short stories in The New Yorker and other prominent literary journals. Her first publisher, Lulu Friedman, was the wife of the Parliamentarian Bernard Friedman, and it was at their house, "Tall Trees" in First Avenue, Lower Houghton, Johannesburg, that Gordimer met other anti-apartheid writers. Gordimer's debut 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. Thereafter, she quickly became active in South African politics, and was close friends with Nelson Mandela's defence attorneys (Bram Fischer and George Bizos) during Rivonia Trial. She also helped Mandela edit his famous speech "I Am Prepared to Die", given from the defendant's dock at the trial. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, she was one of the first people he wanted to see.

During the 1960s and 1970s, she continued to live in Johannesburg, although she occasionally left for short periods of time to teach at several universities in the United States. She had begun to achieve international literary recognition, receiving her first major literary award, the W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award, in 1961. Throughout this time, Gordimer continued to demand through both her writing and her activism that South Africa re-examine and replace its long-held policy of apartheid. 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.Jonathan Steele, " White magic", The Guardian (London), 27 October 2001.Gail Caldwell, " South African Writer Given Nobel", The Boston Globe, 4 October 1991. A World of Strangers was banned for twelve years. Other works were censored for lesser amounts of time. Burger's Daughter, published in June 1979, was banned one month later. The Publications Committee's Appeal Board reversed the censorship of Burger's Daughter three months later, determining that the book was too one-sided to be subversive." Radiation, Race, and Molly Bloom: Nadine Gordimer Talks with BookForum", BookForum, Feb / March 2006. 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 wrote an account of the censorship in "What Happened to Burger's Daughter or How South African Censorship Works". Gordimer's subsequent novels escaped censorship under apartheid."Burger’s Daughter was the last of Gordimer’s novels to enter the censorship system. Though her short-story collection A Soldier’s Embrace (1980) was scrutinised and passed in 1980, July’s People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), and My Son’s Story (1990) appear not to have been submitted in any of their editions." Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 239. In 2001, a provincial education department temporarily removed July's People from the school reading list, along with works by other anti-apartheid writers,BBC News, " South Africa reinstates authors", 22 April 2001." Gordimer detractors 'insulting', says Asmal ", News24.com, 19 April 2001. describing July's People as "deeply racist, superior and patronising"Anuradha Kumar, " New Boundaries", The Hindu, 1 August 2004.—a characterisation that Gordimer took as a grave insult, and that many literary and political figures protested.

In South Africa, she joined the African National Congress when it was still listed as an illegal organisation by the South African government.Donald Morrison, " Nadine Gordimer", Time Magazine, 60 Years of Heroes (2006). 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. She hid ANC leaders in her own home to aid their escape from arrest by the government, and she said that the proudest day of her life was when she testified at the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists. (See Simon Nkoli, Mosiuoa Lekota, etc.) Throughout these years she also regularly took part in anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa, and traveled internationally speaking out against South African apartheid and discrimination and political repression.

Her works began achieving literary recognition early in her career, with her first international recognition in 1961, followed by numerous literary awards throughout the ensuing decades. Literary recognition for her accomplishments culminated with the Nobel Prize for Literature on 3 October 1991, 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.Christopher S. Wren, " Former Censors Bow Coldly to Apartheid Chronicler", New York Times, 6 October 1991. 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.Agence France-Presse, "Nobel laureates join battle against AIDS", 1 December 2004. 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. Gordimer and literary giants fight AIDS , iafrica.com, 29 November 2004.Nadine Gordimer and Anthony Sampson, Letter to The New Review of Books, 16 November 2000.

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. South Africa: The New Threat to Freedom The New York Review of Books. 24 May 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. In 1954, she married Reinhold Cassirer, a highly respected art dealer from the well-known German-Jewish Cassirer family. Cassirer established the South African Sotheby's and later ran his own gallery; their "wonderful marriage" lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955, and is a filmmaker in New York, with whom Gordimer collaborated on at least two documentaries. Gordimer's daughter, Oriane Gavronsky, has two children and lives in the South of France. Gordimer’s family requests privacy SAPA. 15 July 2014 Gordimer also spent time with her family in France, as she and Cassirer had bought a small hilltop home near Nice. Anthony Sampson on Nadine Gordimer: 'She was conscious of living in a land of heroes' The Guardian. 16 July 2014

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."Jannika Hurwitt, Interview with Gordimer, Paris Review, 88, Summer 1983. She was not involved in Jewish communal life, though both her husbands were Jewish. 'Prickly' Gordimer, anti-apartheid star The Jewish Chronicle. 17 July 2014 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." She read Teilhard de Chardin, Simone Weil and books about world religions, continuing: "For the first time in my life I learned something about Judaism, the religion of my parents. But it didn't happen. I could not take the leap of faith." She did, however, feel that her moral values emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

(1996). 9780520200456, University of California Press. ISBN 9780520200456

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."

In 2008, Gordimer defended her decision to attend a Jerusalem Writers Conference in Israel. Nadine Gordimer Defends Decision to Attend J'lem Writers Conference Haaretz. 30 April 2008 Gordimer could be critical of Israel, but rejected comparison of its policies to apartheid in South Africa. Nadine Gordimer, chronicler of South Africa, dies at 90 The Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 14 July 2014

Until the end of her life, she lived in the same home in Parktown in Johannesburg for over five decades.Magdalena, Karina. "Die miesies hy skryf". Die Burger Accessed 24 July 2024. In 2006, Gordimer was attacked in her home by robbers, sparking outrage in the country. Gordimer apparently refused to move into a gated community, against the advice of some friends. Gordimer's sorrow for men who robbed her The Guardian. 2 November 2006 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."

Unauthorised biography

In 2006, Ronald Suresh Roberts published a biography of Gordimer titled No Cold Kitchen. She had granted Roberts interviews and access to her personal papers, with an understanding that she would authorise the biography in return for a right to review the manuscript before publication. However, Gordimer and Roberts failed to reach an agreement over his account of the illness and death of Gordimer's husband Reinhold Cassirer and an affair Gordimer had in the 1950s, as well as criticism of her views on the Israel–Palestine conflict. Gordimer disowned the book, accusing Roberts of breach of trust. Publishers Bloomsbury Publishing in London and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York subsequently withdrew from the project. Suresh subsequently criticised Gordimer for her decision and her stances on other issues.

Death

Gordimer died in her sleep at her Johannesburg home on 13 July 2014 at the age of 90.

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.

Overview of critical works

Her first published novel, The Lying Days (1953), takes place in Gordimer's home town of Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town near Johannesburg. Arguably a semi-autobiographical work, The Lying Days is a Bildungsroman, charting the growing political awareness of a young white woman, Helen, toward small-town life and South African racial division.

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. Institute for Justice and Reconciliation website, Attitudes towards interracial marriages in South Africa, article dated 3 July 2017 BBC website, South Africa’s first inter-racial marriage South African History Online website, The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act commences

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 people 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". Thematically covering the same ground as Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1977), the "conservationist" seeks to conserve nature to preserve the apartheid system, keeping change at bay. When an unidentified corpse is found on his farm, Mehring does the "right thing" by providing it a proper burial; but the dead person haunts the work, a reminder of the bodies on which Mehring's vision would be built.

Gordimer's 1979 novel Burger's Daughter is the story of a woman analysing her relationship with her father, a martyr to the anti-apartheid movement. The child of two Communist and anti-apartheid revolutionaries, Rosa Burger finds herself drawn into political activism as well. Written in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto uprising, the novel was shortly thereafter banned by the South African government. Gordimer described the novel as a "coded homage" to Bram Fischer, the lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists.

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. ReadingGroup Guide, The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer, Bookreporter.comDavid Medalie, "'The Context of the Awful Event': Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun", Journal of Southern African Studies, v.25, n.4 (December 1999), pp. 633–644.

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.J. M. Coetzee Review of The Pickup and Loot and Other Stories, nytimes.com, 23 October 2003.Sue Kossew, " Review of Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup ", Quodlibet, v.1, February 2005.Penguin Book Clubs/Reading Guides, Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup , penguingroup.com; accessed 19 June 2015.Anthony York, " The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer " (book review), Salon.com, 6 December 2001.

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. New York Times critic J. R. Ramakrishnan, who noted a similarity with author Mia Alvar, wrote that Gordimer wrote about "long-suffering spouses and (the) familial enablers of political men" in her fiction.

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."

In The Later Fiction by Nadine Gordimer (Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), edited by Bryce King, Michael Wade fostered a discussion on Jewish identity as a repressed theme in Gordimer's novel, A Sport of Nature (1987): "Any exploration of the Jewish theme in Nadine Gordimer's writing, especially her novels, in an exploration of the absent, the unwritten, the repressed." Wade noted parallels between Gordimer's white, Jewish social milieu with those of Jewish writers living in urban areas on America's east coast: "Jewishness functioning as a mysterious but ineluctable cultural component of individual identity and expressed as an aspect of the nominally Jewish writer's particular, unique quest for identity in a heterogeneous society".