Litnet

Book cover: https://jacana.co.za/product/my-thirty-minute-bar-mitzvah/

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No root runs deeper than one that passes through the wound of love.

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Denis Hirson, My thirty-minute bar mitzvah
Johannesburg: Jacana, 2022
ISBN: 9781431433254

Denis Hirson left South Africa in 1973 at the age of 22. His family was given three days to pack up their home in Johannesburg and leave by ship from Cape Town, following the release from prison of his father, Baruch Hirson, who had served a nine-year sentence for sabotage as a member of the ARM, the African Resistance Movement. If they had stayed, Baruch, a lecturer in mathematics at Wits at the time of his detention, would have been subject to banning and house arrest on his release.

After two years in the United Kingdom, Denis went to Paris on the off chance of rekindling an old relationship. An unexpected offer of a flat rent-free for six months gave him the opportunity that he had vaguely known he wanted: to strike out on his own in a new country and in a new language, an opportunity to make Europe his own, within himself. It seemed like a solution, and became one. He taught English and worked in the theatre, at some distance from the social anthropology that he had studied at Wits, but he was working his way to becoming a writer.

Thirteen years after leaving his home country, with a working knowledge of French – in an accent that never left him and which, he confesses, he never really sought to lose – he discovered his métier, which was memoir. The hugely successful The house next door to Africa was published in 1986. In addition to theatre, Hirson immersed himself in poetry, translating Breyten Breytenbach from an Afrikaans for which his high schooling had not prepared him. His South African childhood and teenage years became a rich seam that he has continued to mine for his writing ever since – paradoxically, perhaps, because Paris was a place of new beginnings, but also, fittingly, because his distance from that childhood is precisely what has made it so miraculous, and so writable.

Hirson has produced six books thus far, all of them explorations of his South African past. To speak of them all simply as memoir, however, is to understate the freshness and versatility of Hirson’s writing. His most successful work from a commercial point of view, I remember King Kong (the boxer) (2004), is based on Georges Perec’s Je me souviens, a series of loosely connected vignettes grounded in vividly remembered objects and moments, without obvious thematic signposting. Perec’s book reached out to a vividly remembered world through an existential void, the result of his parents’ deaths in World War II, his father as a soldier and his mother in the Holocaust. It was a suitable model for Hirson following the death of his own father in 1999, for whom I remember King Kong was an act of mourning.

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Published this year by Jacana, My thirty-minute bar mitzvah revisits this terrain but from a very different point of view. On Denis’s thirteenth birthday, Baruch was allowed to spend 30 minutes with his son in the back of a prison department Volkswagen Beetle in the car park of the Fort in Johannesburg. In the front seats sat two prison officers. Throughout the encounter, Denis’s mother sat watching from the family car some distance off. During the largely silent meeting, the father regularly squeezed his son’s hand in a way that the child later registered was a coded message intended for his mother, but which left him bewildered at the time.

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Published this year by Jacana, My thirty-minute bar mitzvah revisits this terrain but from a very different point of view. On Denis’s thirteenth birthday, Baruch was allowed to spend 30 minutes with his son in the back of a prison department Volkswagen Beetle in the car park of the Fort in Johannesburg. In the front seats sat two prison officers. Throughout the encounter, Denis’s mother sat watching from the family car some distance off. During the largely silent meeting, the father regularly squeezed his son’s hand in a way that the child later registered was a coded message intended for his mother, but which left him bewildered at the time.

As the hinge on which the book turns, this event opens long-buried emotional wounds. As an avowedly secular man, a Trotskyist, Baruch was disinterested in his Jewish heritage, to the extent that before his arrest he had discouraged Denis from having a bar mitzvah at all. His mother had her own strengths and frailties, but her role as a Jewish parent was not a priority. Denis was sent to school with packed lunches that were noticed by other Jewish boys for not being kosher, and their bar mitzvahs were grave but mysterious affairs. Baruch’s religion was, in fact, his political idealism, which filled the house with silences, whispered conversations and intensities that became a barely understood aura.

Which is not to say that the relationship lacked love. On the contrary, it was love that made his absence so material, that made that Other Place of prison so much a part of Denis himself, as it did with the children of other political prisoners: “It woke up with us, ate with us at table, filtered the sunlight during holidays, sat at the fireside in the Highveld winter, went pacing through our dreams.” As the teenage years unfolded and the son felt the weight of what his father had done, he came to understand eventually that their bond had rooted him, the eldest son, in the country of his birth, “by the wound of his [the father’s] absence”.

Compelling as all this is, it is not the emotional heart of the book. In order for Hirson to get to grips with the nexus of confused feeling, it required a third party to enable him to understand fully what had taken place in the intimacy of his relationship with his father. The third party in question is his daughter, Anna. At her (informal and secular) bat mitzvah, surrounded by the extended family, regathered in what had once been their place of exile in Paris and what was now home, Anna chose to read and interpret from Genesis the passage that, in her view, came closest to defining the relationship that Denis had had with his father: the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham.

It was not the first time that the story of Abraham and Isaac had been a touchstone for Hirson’s sense of his relationship with Baruch. During a visit to Florence long after his father’s death, during which he went to see the restored panels for the doors of the Baptistery of San Giovanni made by fifteenth century sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (a commission that Ghiberti won by producing a panel depicting the sacrifice of Isaac), Hirson had had a dream in which the doors opened, revealing a smiling moon that Hirson knew to be his father, Baruch.

But when his daughter presented the story, the effect was far less benign: “[I]n case I had wanted to swerve away from looking at it more closely, my eleven-year-old daughter was sitting before me, demanding of me that I keep my eyes fixed upon that boy and his dire predicament.” In her hands, the story was an act of betrayal: she “was drawing me back not to what my father had done out in the world, but to what had happened between him and myself in the intimacy of our relationship”. He should not have, she frankly declared.

Nothing is benign in this version. The story is all about losing: “Isaac loses his father and Abraham almost loses himself as a father, which he would have done if he had killed Isaac, but even if he doesn’t kill him, he loses himself because Isaac no longer feels protected.” The relationship between father and son cannot be settled; it is only in the relationship between the Isaac who survives and his daughter, that Isaac’s vulnerability can be properly acknowledged.

The sacrifice in the son Hirson’s life lay in the father’s cutting him off from his ancestry, from the Jewish heritage that might have given him a more secure footage in the world. He has to discover that heritage for himself, which he does by visiting his grandparents in Israel and hearing the stories of their travails, the danger and comedy of their ancient lives that began with their flight from persecution in Eastern Europe. Not that Israel becomes a place of imagined comfort for Hirson: it exists only as a fund of narrative, a source of continuity, of the origin myths that his father’s obsessions prevented him from passing on.

Continuity is an essential thread that runs through the memoir: its destruction and re-creation. To his children, Hirson passes on objects that connect them to the past that he has had to create for himself: for his son, an embroidered cover for a Bible that a woman in prison in Barberton stitched and presented to the Hirson family, in honour of Baruch; for his daughter, an egg scale that comes down from the kitchens of his grandmother’s Russian past. Simple objects now endowed with their proper historical weight and handed on.

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My thirty-minute bar mitzvah raises awkward questions around the genre of political memoir in South Africa, which has tended to celebrate “the insistent, long-distance, sweet-as-blood siren-call of the Struggle”.

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My thirty-minute bar mitzvah raises awkward questions around the genre of political memoir in South Africa, which has tended to celebrate “the insistent, long-distance, sweet-as-blood siren-call of the Struggle”. Comparable work might be found in that of Joe Slovo and Ruth First’s daughters: Shawn Slovo’s film A world apart and Gillian Slovo’s memoir, Every secret thing. Like Gillian Slovo’s, Hirson’s book might be suggesting that the overdue emotional reckoning for the personal consequences of lives lived primarily in the Struggle comes not from the children of the heroes, but from their children, the third generation. Perhaps it is only in that generation that the destructive romance will be properly and finally understood, and possibly forgiven.