Contextualising the history and zeitgeist of a generation

By Jeremy Gordin

South African born Jack Hoffmann has written what’s generally referred to as a ‘coming-of-age’ story.

It’s a meticulously written novel, respectful of its characters, readers and history, its tone serious, and its pace unhurried.

The protagonist is Zak Ginsberg, whom we first encounter as a young boy, growing up in the South Africa of the 50s and 60s. When he tries to help the son of the domestic servant who cared for him and whom he loved as a little boy, Zak is arrested and brutally tortured by the security branch. So, the person on whose ‘psychological and moral growth’ we are focusing is Zak. But Hoffmann has cast a large net.

First, we come to understand Zak through his family; a Lithuanian (Litvak) father who has come to South Africa to look for employment, and his larger Litvak family who do not escape the Holocaust that sweeps across the Old Country. Second, Zak’s journey through life is mirrored by the journey of the son of Zak’s childhood nanny, Mpande Gumedi. He has joined the ANC underground, trained in the USSR, and returned to SA to plant bombs.

The book contextualises, traces and lays out the history and zeitgeist of a generation — the children of immigrant Lithuanian Jews, born in SA in the 1940s, 50s and even 60s. It does the same for a black generation also born in those years. And this contextualisation, at least in the case of Zak, also encompasses the Holocaust in Lithuania, while SA’s political history is interwoven throughout the narrative.

Besides the book’s meticulous texture — the reader feels its characters’ experiences and the grain of their lives, He Does Not Die a Death of Shame is extraordinarily compassionate, because it succeeds at entering and showing everyone’s lives without being judgment

He Does Not Die a Death of Shame by Jack Hoffmann.


Jack Hoffmann’s novel is an exploration of moral conduct in extremis.

He has written two tales: The first a family saga ranging from protagonist Zak Ginsberg’s Lithuanian antecedents, nearly all of whom become early Holocaust victims, to Zak’s father Dan and uncle Len, who leave Europe in time to begin new lives in racist South Africa. It is the archetypal story of South African Jewry with its almost exclusively Lithuanian origins.

The narrative opens in 1920 with Zechariya, Zak’s great-grandfather after whom he is named, successfully delivering a Christian child in squalid conditions. Quixotically tilting at a pervasive antisemitism, Zechariya wants the goyim to know that, in the absence of the sick village midwife, they were helped by a Jew. But after the birth, the drunken Lithuanian father can find just two words for the man who gave his son life: “Filthy yid!”

The Ginsbergs are not religious. For them, the essence of Judaism is not in rite or ritual but in moral action, for example in helping to preserve human life. As the Talmud teaches: “He who saves a single life, saves the world entire.”

Inspired by Zaida Zechariya and the family’s humanist outlook, Dan Ginsberg’s ambition is to become a physician. But his academic dreams are dashed when a late 1920s upsurge of antisemitism back home leaves the family unable to continue supporting his studies in distant Strasbourg. Acting on his father’s advice, he leaves for South Africa to join his brother Len.
There he sets up a successful business and marries for love. But when he learns of the annihilation in 1941 of the entire family left behind in Lithuania, he grows cold and distant. The marriage suffers.

Partly as a result, Zak, born in December that year, develops a close relationship with the black African “servant,” (housemaid-cum-nanny), Zanele, almost like mother and son.

This untrammeled black-white bond frames a second tale which brings to the fore the moral dilemmas facing Jews in Apartheid South Africa. It follows the converging paths of Zak and Mpande Gumede, Zanele’s biological son, leading with tragic inevitability to their violent deaths. They meet first as young playmates oblivious of South Africa’s institutionalized color bar, when in the early 1950s, Mpande makes a rare visit from Zululand to be with his mother.

The focus shifts from one to the other until their paths cross again two decades later, when Mpande, turned hardened anti-Apartheid terrorist/freedom fighter, exploits Zak’s deepest inner conflicts, forcing the brilliant young surgeon to decide how far to go in assisting the black liberation struggle, the goals of which he backs.

THE BOOK’S title, He Does Not Die a Death of Shame, is taken from Oscar Wilde’s poem “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” In Wilde’s universe, all men are morally tainted (“each man kills the thing he loves”) but nearly all escape unpunished. The few who are jailed for whatever offence, in Wilde’s case homosexuality, are the ones a cruel and arbitrarily conformist society deems shamed.

Hoffmann takes Wilde’s vision a step further, beyond social mores. Both Zak and Mpande are tortured to death in captivity by a sickeningly vindictive state authority. But, in Zak’s case, and we assume in Mpande’s, too, they do not “die a death of shame,” steadfastly refusing to betray “the cause” or compromise their integrity even at pain of death.

The novel challenges Jewish liberals trapped within the Apartheid system (or for that matter within any other repressive social structure) to make moral choices. Do Jews, themselves long-suffering victims of discrimination, have a special responsibility to fight a regime that dehumanizes, disenfranchises and victimizes others? If so, is it enough, as Zak initially does, to make a significant professional contribution, initiate small gestures for social change and treat whites and blacks equally? Or is it incumbent upon Jewish humanists to go further and fight for change through non-violent political action or, as Zak eventually does, by aiding and abetting random acts of urban terrorism?

For Hoffmann, the choices are never simple, the degree of morality relative and dependent on very specific circumstances.
In Apartheid South Africa, most Jewish liberals simply left. Over 60,000, around half the Jewish population, emigrated to more democratic pastures, arguing that they wanted no part of the evil system for themselves or their children. Some came to Israel, as Jews choosing their own ethnic battleground for freedom.

Like many of his generation, Zak Ginsberg may well have ended up living and working abroad. After passing his final exams, he is about to take up a prestigious hospital post in London. But then comes Mpande’s fateful nocturnal knock on the door, sucking Zak into the maelstrom of urban terrorism and, at the same time, highlighting the chance nature of his involvement.
Had there been no knock on the door, Zak would have been able to live out his life abroad with few moral qualms. But once it came, given his overwhelming sense of the injustice of the system, he feels morally bound to transport a large quantity of explosives assigned for urban bombings. After his arrest, he sees the only honorable path in resisting his torturers at every turn, even though it means losing both thumbs, never being able to operate again and, ultimately, death. This in Hoffmann’s terms, is how he “becomes a man.”

In the wider scheme of things, Zak’s heroic sacrifice does little for black liberation. Violence played a negligible role in Apartheid’s undoing. It collapsed in the face of international isolation, economic stress and growing domestic recognition of the system’s inherent evil.

For Hoffmann, himself a South African-born surgeon, Zak’s moral predicament clearly poses a nightmarish personal test. But the fact that Zak’s choices cause so much suffering for so little gain, such waste of great promise, suggests a final twist: a retrospective justification for South African Jews of conscience finding other ways to help the cause or other causes to help.
The novel’s epic proportions, sharp political context and Hoffmann’s keen eye for detail make for an engrossing and enlightening read.

Book review: The ballad of the beloved country

This is the kind of book that could cause to you to smile or even laugh as you read it, but it might ultimately make you cry. Once you start reading it, though, you may not be able to put it down.

By STEVE LINDE  

In the acknowledgment to his debut novel, He Does Not Die A Death of Shame, author Jack Hoffmann notes that “Oscar Wilde suffered from an earlier form of apartheid,” walking “with other souls in pain, within another ring.”

It is an apt introduction to this riveting book, which contains real historical figures in a tragic tale that follows the lives of two young men: Zacharia (Zak) Ginsberg, a Jewish surgeon of Lithuanian descent, and Mpande (Simon) Gumede, an ANC freedom fighter from Zululand, in apartheid South Africa. The title comes from Wilde’s famous poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”
Hoffmann calls it “a South African-Jewish chronicle spanning two generations from 1908 to 1972.''

Ginsberg is the son of Dan Ginsberg, a Jew who escaped Lithuania because of rising antisemitism, and Debora Becker, who suffers the abuse of her single mother and the prejudices of the local Jewish community. In the shadow of his parents’ sad history, Zak seeks solace from his Zulu nanny, Zanele, and befriends her son, Mpande.

“Their destinies become inexorably intertwined in their pursuit of what is right,” Hoffmann writes. “Zak studies the art of saving lives. Simon learns the craft of destroying lives. Both are drawn into the anti-apartheid struggle. The one acts because his ancestors were victims, the other because he himself is a victim.”

The book begins in Lithuania in the 1920s, where a new authoritarian regime bans Jews from studying at universities, prompting Dan Ginsberg to move to Strasbourg to study medicine. But as antisemitism explodes in Europe before the Holocaust, his father, Moshe, advises Dan to join his brother, Len, in South Africa.

With a heavy heart, he halts his medical studies and follows his father’s advice, never to see his family again. In a small package in his tallis bag he finds a King George V gold sovereign, wrapped in a message written by his father in Yiddish, Gedenk fun vu du kumen, Remember where you come from.

This sets the tone for the rest of the book’s plot, which makes for fascinating reading. Dan marries Debora and they raise their son, Zak, in Johannesburg, where he gradually learns what it is to be Jewish, white, English-speaking – and different – in apartheid South Africa.

Mpande has an apparently idyllic childhood in rustic Zululand, but after seeing how Zak’s family lives, he is pained by not having a father, and becomes increasingly angry about what it means to be a black, second-class citizen under the cruel apartheid system.

As Zak studies to become a surgeon, Mpande trains abroad to fight for the ANC’s military wing, Umkonto we Sizwe.

The two meet up again, as the drama unfolds when Mpande is sent back to South Africa to carry out an attack. But this review is not meant to be a spoiler. You should read the book for yourself!

Hoffmann, by the way, is a retired surgeon who grew up in South Africa, moved to Denmark with his wife, and they have a son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. He also happens to be the brother of Alvin Hoffmann, former managing editor of The Jerusalem Report.

He notes that he has published more than 130 scientific articles in medical journals as well as several magazine articles, and he is a fine writer.

When Mpande recruits Zak to help him on a mission (I won’t reveal more), he asks how many white liberals who live in luxury but say they oppose apartheid actually do something. “How many are in fact ready to give up all this and really fight the regime? Risk arrest? Put their lives at risk? And those that do risk arrest, as you have, do they truly believe in our cause, or do they do so to make themselves feel like heroes, so that they boast to their friends, claim a free ticket when we one day win the war?”

When Zak is arrested by South Africa’s Special Branch (I won’t reveal why), he tells his sadistic interrogator, Captain Anton van Schalkwyk, that there is an alternative to evil.

“See the other man’s point of view, recognize his fears, his wants, his desires, his rightful place in the scheme of things,” he says. “Negotiation, mutual concessions. You mentioned that you know my namesake, Zacharia, the prophet, from the bible. Well, he has the answer for you: ‘Not by might, and not by power, but by my spirit.’”

In his two protagonists, Hoffmann does justice both to the wise words of Zak’s grandfather, Moshe, “Remember where you come from,” and the passage from Wilde’s famous poem, which appears on his tombstone:

“And alien tears will fill for him,
    Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
    And outcasts always mourn.”

Be warned: This is the kind of book that could cause to you to smile or even laugh as you read it, but it might ultimately make you cry. Once you start reading it, though, you may not be able to put it down.

Jack Hoffman’s He Does Not Die a Death of Shame is a coming-of-age story written by a South African-trained surgeon in his late 70s who’s been living in Scandinavia for close to four decades.

by JEREMY GORDIN 

It is an “old-fashioned” book in terms of its approach (respectful of its characters, readers, and of history), its tone (serious), and its pace (unhurried). Yet, “old-fashioned” though it might be, one should not underestimate this book which, in its quiet and unassuming way, is exceptional and ambitious.

Here’s a very bald summary of the plot. The main protagonist is Zak Ginsberg, whom we first encounter as a young boy, and who grows up in the South Africa of the ‘50s and ‘60s, becoming a doctor, and then - because he is trying to help the son of the domestic servant who cared for him and whom he loved as a little boy - Zak is arrested and brutally tortured by the security branch.

So, the protagonist on whose “psychological and moral growth” we are focusing is Zak. But Hoffmann has much bigger fish - or rather many more fish - to fry. First, we come to understand Zak’s mental and ethical growth by being shown the family from whom he comes - a Lithuanian (Litvak) father who has gone to South Africa to look for employment, and the family from whom he in turn springs, who don’t escape the Holocaust that sweeps across the old country. 

In addition, Zak’s journey through life is later in the book mirrored by the “journey” of the previously mentioned son of Zak’s childhood nanny. Mpande Gumedi, the little boy with whom Zak played when he was a little boy, has, as you might have expected, joined the African National Congress underground, trained in the USSR, and returned to South Africa to plant bombs.

In short, the “person” on whose life’s journey we are focusing is more than one protagonist. Actually, this book contextualises, traces, and lays out the history and zeitgeist of a generation (or many of them, at any rate) - the children of immigrant Lithuanian Jews, born in South Africa in the 1940s, ‘50s and even ‘60s. At the same time, it does the same for a black generation (or many of them) also born in those years. And this contextualisation, at least in the case of Zak, also encompasses the Holocaust in Lithuania. Additionally, South Africa’s political history (do we “Seffricans” have any other?) is neatly interwoven throughout the narrative.  

Hoffmann delivers all this with intelligence and balance. To take just one example, Zak’s “ethical values”, which cause him to want to “assist” Mpande, and which end in the horror of Zak’s arrest and torture, aren’t the fruit of some corny Hollywood-type vision or decision. They are, given the boy and young man with whom we have become acquainted, and given the family from which he comes, entirely natural and convincing.

What’s most remarkable about this book is its texture and attention to detail. Early in the book, Zak has a “conversation” with an “imaginary friend” - himself, his alter ego, or whom-you-will - who helps him to sort out his thoughts and feelings, and who will of course re-appear towards the end of the book.

I note this because it struck me that, in writing this book, Hoffmann (now in his late-70s, as mentioned) must have had numerous, attentive conversations with his earlier self. For Hoffmann’s recreation of that era - what things were like, what you saw, how primary and high school “felt”, what living in South Africa in the ‘50s and ‘60s was like - is well-nigh faultless.

Here is Zak’s experience in cheder, the afternoon school for Jewish children where they’re taught Hebrew, religious knowledge, and prepared for their Barmitzvah.

“One boy mumbles, ‘Can I fxck your daughter?’

“’Woss?’ asks the hapless Mr Gruber (an Eastern European refugee who might well be a learned man but, to make a living, must teach little monsters at a cheder).

“‘Can I have a drink of water?’

“Howls of ruthless laughter ring out.

“I stare silently down at my desk during these exchanges because they are cruel, and because I think it strange to make fun of the man’s accent when most of our parents spoke English in the same way.” 

In short, He Does Not Die a Death of Shame appeals to me because this intricately-fashioned portrait of a milieu and history is my history. It’s familiar and heart-warming.

And yet, given that the main part of this book is about the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, into the ‘70s, I can’t help asking, what about the me who lives in South Africa now, or what about any other reader - me, she or he - who has been living here for the last 25 years or more and has witnessed the depressing failure of the great dream of the rainbow nation? 

So many of the noble elements of the struggle, those which propelled most of the people involved in it, have now been laid to waste or forgotten. This being the case, such motivations and “beliefs”, which are of course at the core of this book, feel distressingly quaint, like doilies from the 1960s.

In other words, this book could easily be disparaged by old (or even young) cynics as a “kumbaya book”, as “woke” and sentimental.

I hope not. He Does Not Die a Death of Shame is a book of meticulous texture - the reader feels its characters’ experience and the grain of their lives. Above all, this book is extraordinarily compassionate because it succeeds at entering in and showing everyone’s lives without being judgmental. 

This might sound sentimental - and doubtless it is - but reading this book was “gentling” for me, and it feels entirely apposite that it was written by a doctor - a healer.