JACOBSON, Dan

Nationality: British. Born: Johannesburg, South Africa, 7 March 1929. Education: The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1946-49, B.A. 1949. Family: Married Margaret Pye in 1954; three sons and one daughter. Career: Public relations assistant, South African Jewish Board of Deputies, Johannesburg, 1951-52; correspondence secretary, Mills and Feeds Ltd., Kimberley, South Africa, 1952-54. Fellow in Creative Writing, Stanford University, California, 1956-57; visiting professor, Syracuse University, New York, 1965-66; visiting fellow, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1971, and Australian National University, Canberra, 1980; lecturer, 1976-80, reader, 1980-88, professor of English, 1988-94, University College, London. Since 1994, professor emeritus, University College, London. Vice-chair of the Literature Panel, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974-76. Awards: Rhys Memorial prize, 1959; Maugham award, 1964; H.H. Wingate award (Jewish Chronicle, London), 1978; Society of Authors traveling scholarship, 1986; J.R. Ackerley award, for autobiography, 1986. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1974. D. Litt., University of Witwatersrand, 1997. Agent: A.M. Heath, 79 St. Martin's Lane, London WC2N 4AA, England; or, Russell and Volkening Inc., 50 West 29th Street, New York, New York 10001, U.S.A.

Publications

Novels

The Trap. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and New York, Harcourt Brace, 1955.

A Dance in the Sun. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and New York, Harcourt Brace, 1956.

The Price of Diamonds. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957; New York, Knopf, 1958.

The Evidence of Love. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and Boston, Little Brown, 1960.

The Beginners. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and New York, Macmillan, 1966.

The Rape of Tamar. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and New York, Macmillan, 1970.

The Wonder-Worker. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; Boston, Little Brown, 1974.

The Confessions of Josef Baisz. London, Secker and Warburg, 1977; New York, Harper, 1979.

Her Story. London, Deutsch, 1987.

Hidden in the Heart. London, Bloomsbury, 1991.

The God-Fearer. London, Bloomsbury, 1992; New York, Scribner, 1993.

Short Stories

A Long Way from London. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958.

The Zulu and the Zeide. Boston, Little Brown, 1959.

Beggar My Neighbour. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964.

Through the Wilderness. New York, Macmillan, 1968.

Penguin Modern Stories 6, with others. London, Penguin, 1970.

A Way of Life and Other Stories, edited by Alix Pirani. London, Longman, 1971.

Inklings: Selected Stories. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; as Through the Wilderness, London, Penguin, 1977.

Plays

Radio Plays:

The Caves of Adullan, 1972.

Other

No Further West: California Visited. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959; New York, Macmillan, 1961.

Time of Arrival and Other Essays. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and New York, Macmillan, 1963.

The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and Its God. London, Secker and Warburg, and New York, Harper, 1982.

Time and Time Again: Autobiographies. London, Deutsch, andBoston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985.

Adult Pleasures: Essays on Writers and Readers. London, Deutsch, 1988.

The Electronic Elephant: A Southern Africa Journey. London, Hamilton, 1994.

Heshel's Kingdom (memoir). Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1999.

Editor, with Daniel Bar-Tal and Aharon Klieman, Security Concerns: Insights from the Israeli Experience. Stamford, Connecticut, JAI Press, 1998.

Bibliographies:

Dan Jacobson: A Bibliography by Myra Yudelman, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 1967.

Manuscript Collections:

National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa; University of Texas, Austin.

Critical Studies:

"The Novels of Dan Jacobson" by Renee Winegarten, in Midstream (New York), May 1966; "Novelist of South Africa," in The Liberated Woman and Other Americans by Midge Decter, New York, Coward McCann, 1971; "The Gift of Metamorphosis" by Pearl K. Bell, in New Leader (New York), April 1974; "Apollo, Dionysus, and Other Performers in Dan Jacobson's Circus," in World Literature Written in English (Arlington, Texas), April 1974, and "Jacobson's Realism Revisited," in Southern African Review of Books, October 1988, both by Michael Wade; "A Somewhere Place" by C.J. Driver, in New Review (London), October 1977; Dan Jacobson by Sheila Roberts, Boston, Twayne, 1984; "Stories" by John Bayley, in London Review of Books, October 1987; "Intolerance" by Julian Symons, in London Review of Books, October 1992; "The Mother's Space" by Sheila Roberts, in Current Writing (South Africa) 5(1), 1993; "Weapons of Vicissitude" by Richard Lansdown, in The Critical Review (Australia) 34, 1994.

Dan Jacobson comments:

My novels and stories up to and including The Beginners were naturalistic in manner and were written almost entirely about life in South Africa. This is not true of the novels I have written subsequently.

Dan Jacobson's first two novels, The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, marked him as a writer of considerable ability, with an interest in typically South African "problems." Since then, he has developed rapidly to become one of South Africa's best known and most interesting novelists.

The two early novels are both concerned with the tensions inherent in the extremely close, almost familial, relationships between white employer and black employee, which tend to develop in the particular kind of farm community Jacobson describes. Both embody what might be described as allegorical statements about the South African situation. Jacobson implies that the inhabitants of the country are trapped in their own environment and condemned to perform a ritualistic "dance in the sun." To an outsider this can only appear to be a form of insanity. This vision of South Africa leaves out of account, or, at best, finds irrelevant, the group (English speaking, liberal, white) to which Jacobson himself belongs, and it is, therefore, not surprising that he should have chosen to live and work abroad.

For some years, however, his novels continued to deal with South African subjects. The Evidence of Love tells the story of a black man and a white woman who fall in love and attempt to defy South African law and custom by living together. The novel treats the theme of interracial love in a more relaxed and naturalistic way than is usual in South African fiction, and also highlights aspects of the individual struggle for freedom and the achievement of self-identity. The Price of Diamonds focuses on shady dealings and financial corruption in a small town in South Africa, and reveals Jacobson's quite considerable gift for comedy.

The Beginners, which, together with the collection of stories A Long Way from London, established Jacobson's position as a writer of stature, is an ambitious and substantial novel. The story of three generations of an immigrant Jewish family, it offers a penetrating, subtle, and complex analysis of what it means to be a "demi-European at the foot of Africa" and a "demi-Jew" in the modern world. The novels which follow The Beginners are not concerned with South Africa directly, nor are they naturalistic in manner. But two of the three later novels deal with political tensions and power struggles, and in so doing appear to have deliberate parallels with the contemporary situation in South Africa. Jacobson's continuing interest in South Africa is also reflected in his collection of autobiographical pieces, Time and Time Again, in which he reflects, among other things, on the way in which his perceptions of the country have changed since the days when he could see it only as a place from which he had to escape.

The Rape of Tamar is a witty and sophisticated reconstruction of an episode at the court of the biblical King David, focusing on a power struggle between the aging king and his politically ambitious sons. The Wonder-Worker, set in contemporary London, explores the world of a sensitive and lonely character whose inability to establish meaningful relationships leads inevitably to his complete alienation from the world around him, but, paradoxically, also to his ability to understand people completely. Jacobson's novel, The Confessions of Joseph Baisz, is a brilliantly inventive and deeply disturbing fantasy: the "extraordinary autobiography" of an emotionally stunted individual who discovers very early in his bleak life that he is capable of loving only those people whom he has first betrayed. Set in an imaginary country with a nightmarish but distinctly recognizable resemblance to South Africa, the novel is wholly convincing in its portrayal of a society whose members illustrate what Baisz calls "the iron law: the wider their horizons, the narrower their minds."

Like other contemporary South African novelists, Jacobson has written some excellent short stories. Many of them probe the guilts and fears of white South Africans living in the midst of what they regard as an alien and hostile black culture. Two stories that are among the best things he has done are "The Zulu and the Zeide" and "Beggar My Neighbour." The former contrasts the small-minded meanness of a wealthy Jewish businessman with the unaffected humanity of the black servant he employs to care for his ailing father; while "Beggar My Neighbour" movingly evokes the world of a young white boy forced to come to terms with the cruel realities of a racist society through his chance meeting with two black children. In these stories, as in all his work, Jacobson's special skills are displayed: detailed observation, economic presentation, and a compassionate but objective analysis of the varieties of human behavior.

Jacobson showed his imaginative talent to good advantage in The God-Fearer, a novel that takes place in a sort of alternate reality. Set in an indeterminate period that might well be medieval times, the novel gradually unfolds its secret: in this world, Jews are the culturally dominant group in Western civilization, and the "Christers" are a persecuted minority. It is a challenging vision, deftly executed.

—Ursula Edmands

Dan Jacobson

Author Dan Jacobson (born 1929) used his experiences as a child growing up in South Africa to mold his writings about human nature.

Dan Jacobson was born March 7, 1929, in Johannesburg, South Africa, where his parents' families had come to avoid the persecution of Jews in their European homelands. His father, Hymann Michael Jacobson, was born in Iluxt, Latvia, in 1885. His mother, Liebe (Melamed) Jacobson, was born in Kelme, Lithuania, in 1896. Jacobson had two older brothers, Israel Joshua and Hirsch Jacob, and a younger sister, Aviva. His mother's family immigrated to South Africa in 1919, after the death of his grandfather. His grandfather, Heshel Melamed, was a rabbi, and refused to leave Lithuania after traveling to the United States and finding that many Jews were not following their religion. Jacobson later wrote about his travels back to Lithuania to find out more information about his grandfather.

Learned about Prejudice

When Dan was four, the family moved from Johannesburg to Kimberley, which was then under British control. The city had once been a huge diamond mining center, but the mines had closed and the town was in decline. However, the De Beers Consolidated Mines Company continued to have great power. He attended a public school and learned English. During his childhood, he became aware of the ways that different people were treated based on their race, religion, economic status, and social status. In his autobiography Time and Again, he refers to the many classes of people in his community: "The Africans lived either in rooms in the back yards of their employers' houses or in sprawling, dusty, tatterdemalion 'locations'; the Cape Coloureds (people of mixed blood) lived in their parts of town; the whites in theirs. Interspersed among these groups were smaller communities: Indians and Chinese among the non-whites, Jews and Greeks among the whites. As for the major division among the whites themselves, that between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking, or Briton and Boer.… All these peoples met in the streets, they did business with one another, but just about every aspect of their social life was severely segregated. To sit together in the same room with anyone of a darker skin than their own was a moral impossibility for most whites." He later recalled that many of his Jewish friends and acquaintances sympathized with the blacks in South Africa. He began to observe the ways that the government, churches, and the newspapers justified the ill treatment of blacks.

At the age of 11, an event occurred that affected Jacobson for the rest of his life. After helping a boy rescue his book bag from a filthy trash bin, he went to school unaware that he had gotten dirt on the back of his legs. When his teacher mentioned the dirt in front of the class, several of the boys made fun of him and led the class in ignoring him for six to eight weeks. He was stunned at the mob mentality, seeing how a few leaders of the class could control the actions of the entire group. Paul Gready writes in Research in African Literatures: "A childhood experience of bullying and ostracism was something from which Jacobson was 'never to wholly recover."'

Identified as a Jew

The Jewish community in Kimberley was a strong one. More Lithuanian Jews traveled to South Africa in the early 20th century than to any other country except the United States. Many were hoping to follow in the footsteps of Sammy Marks, a Lithuanian who had made his fortune in the diamond mines. The Jewish community grew even closer together in the 1930s as Nazism rose, and they felt connected to Jews around the world.

Jacobson's parents were not particularly religious, but his father insisted that the children attend synagogue and Hebrew lessons, because, as Jacobson later wrote, "To have done less, especially as the Nazi madness swept across Europe, would have seemed to him spineless, even treacherous." Jacobson attended, but usually under protest.

Jacobson attended Boys' High School in Kimberley and graduated at the age of 16. He went on to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he graduated at the top of his class with a bachelor's degree in English Literature. Following his graduation in 1948, he worked as a laborer in an Israeli kibbutz for about a year. Then he got a job as a teacher at a Jewish school in London. In less than a year, he was asked to leave, according to his autobiography, because he did not know enough about Orthodox Judaism.

Became a Writer

He returned to Johannesburg in 1951 and worked for the South African Jewish Board of Deputies as a public relations assistant and then as a journalist for Press Digest. In 1952 he returned to Kimberley to work as a correspondence secretary on his father's cattle farm. During this period he became determined to be a writer. His first literary success occurred with a short story entitled "The Box," which was published in Commentary. It was followed by other short stories in Harpers Bazaar, the New Yorker, and other magazines.

In February 1954, he married Margaret Pye, whom he had met while working in London. She was a teacher and children's writer from Rhodesia and had a son named Julian. They set up residence in London, where they brought up three additional children, Simon Orde, Matthew Lindsay, and Jessica Liebe.

His first novel, The Trap, was released in 1955, followed by A Dance in the Sun in 1956. Both books drawn upon his childhood experiences. Together the two books earned him a yearlong creative writing fellowship at Stanford University in California. During his time at Stanford, he completed his third novel, The Price of Diamonds, which was also set in South Africa but was a lighthearted comedy-mystery with a moral message. All three books dealt with prejudice and racism.

He returned to England in 1957, determined to seek greater depth in his writing. In 1959, he received the John Llewelyn Rhys Award for fiction for his collection of short stories, A Long Way from London. In 1960, The Evidence of Love was published. It dealt with the racism involved in a romantic relationship between a black man and a white woman who were put in prison for getting married. In 1964, he received the W. Somerset Maugham award for his first collection of essays, Time of Arrival. One of his short stories, "The Zulu and the Zeide," was adapted into a musical and produced on Broadway in 1965. In 1966, he published The Beginners, a longer, in-depth novel following the lives of a Jewish family after their emigration to South Africa. It was a great literary success.

Over the next two decades, he continued to write while holding various teaching positions. In 1965-66, he was visiting professor at Syracuse University in New York. A Dance in the Sun, his second novel, was produced as the play Day of the Lion in Cleveland in 1968. He was a Visiting Fellow at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the summer of 1971. In 1974, he became vice chair of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1981, he was a Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University. He also took a position at the University of London as a lecturer; from 1979 to 1987 he was a reader in English. In 1988, he became a professor of English, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1994.

A Change in Focus

Jacobson's first five novels all focused on South Africa. His writing focus then shifted to moral and ethical issues involving all of humanity. Although he had no interest in learning the Bible as a child, he developed a strong interest in the Old Testament as an adult. In The Rape of Tamar, he retells the story of the rape of Tamar by her half-brother Amnon, the brother of Absolom. The book was adapted into a play called Yonadeb, after the narrative character in the book, and was produced in London in 1985.

In The Story of Stories: The Chosen People and its God, he provided a study of the Bible. His goal was to have a textual analysis as a narrative. The book was criticized by many Jews, probably because he refers to God as "an imaginative creation."

Themes that continued to reveal themselves in his works included race relations, class consciousness, human nature, universal traits, group mentality, corruption, betrayal, guilt, power, and social morality. In an article that he wrote for Commentary in 2000, entitled "My Jewish Childhood," Jacobson said: "It is always going to be difficult to get socially and racially diverse people to live harmoniously together within a single polity."

In 1985, his autobiography, Time and Again: Autobiographical Essays, was published. Each of the 13 chapters tells of an event in his life that shaped his way of thinking about the human race. The book won the J.R. Ackerly Prize for autobiography.

The God-Fearer, published in 1992, is a story of persecution. Jews are in the majority and oppress a group called the "Christers." In a Washington Post article, Anne Roiphe observed: "By making the majority Jewish, Jacobson makes it clear that power is the source of oppression: not that the power is German or Christian, but that it has the weight of numbers. … The horror of the story lies not in gruesome details or heated prose, but in the calm truth of what we call normal behavior when we try to save our skin at any cost."

In the middle 1990s, Jacobson turned to nonfiction. In 1994 he published The Electronic Elephant: A South African Journey about his travels back to South Africa to observe the changes in the land and the culture since his childhood. In 1998, Heshel's Kingdom provided a moving story of his travels to Lithuania to learn more about the life of his grandfather. He started with his grandfather's identity document, spectacles, an address book, an old photograph, and the memories of relatives. Sadly, he found no trace of his grandfather, and, indeed, not even the cemetery he was buried in remained. He did find that in 1941, within six weeks' time, the Nazis essentially wiped out the Lithuanian Jewish community, killing 210,000.

Although retired from the University of London, Jacobson continues to write. A Mouthful of Glass was published in 2000.

Books

The International Who's Who, Europa Publications Limited, 2001.

Jacobson, Dan, Time and Again: Autobiography, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985.

Periodicals

Commentary, November 2000.

Daily Mail and Guardian, July 20, 1998.

Judaism, Winter 2001.

Research in African Literatures, Winter 1994.

Washington Post, December 26, 1993.

Online

"Dan Jacobson," Gale Literary Databases,http://www.galenet.com (January 21, 2002).

"Dan Jacobson," Harry Ranson Humanities Research Center,http://www.hrc.utexas.edu (January 21, 2002). □

JACOBSON, Dan

Nationality: British. Born: Johannesburg, South Africa, 7 March 1929. Education: The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1946-49, B.A. 1949. Family: Married Margaret Pye in 1954; two sons and one daughter. Career: Public relations assistant, South African Jewish Board of Deputies, Johannesburg, 1951-52; correspondence secretary, Mills and Feeds Ltd., Kimberley, South Africa, 1952-54; fellow in creative writing, Stanford University, California, 1956-57; visiting professor, Syracuse University, New York, 1965-66; visiting fellow, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1971, and Australian National University, Canberra, 1980; lecturer, 1976-80, reader, 1980-88, and beginning 1988 professor of English, University College, London. Vice-chairman of the Literature Panel, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974-76. Lives in London. Awards: Rhys Memorial prize, 1959; Maugham award, 1964; H. H. Wingate award (Jewish Chronicle, London), 1978; Society of Authors traveling scholarship, 1986; J. R. Ackerley award, for autobiography, 1986; Mary Elinore Smith Poetry prize, 1992. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1974.

Publications

Short Stories

A Long Way from London. 1958.

The Zulu and the Zeide. 1959.

Beggar My Neighbour. 1964.

Through the Wilderness. 1968.

A Way of Life and Other Stories, edited by Alix Pirani. 1971.

Inklings: Selected Stories (includes stories from Beggar My Neighbour and Through the Wilderness). 1973; as Through the Wilderness, 1977.

Novels

The Trap. 1955.

A Dance in the Sun. 1956.

The Price of Diamonds. 1957.

The Evidence of Love. 1960.

The Beginners. 1966.

The Rape of Tamar. 1970.

The Wonder-Worker. 1973.

The Confessions of Josef Baisz. 1977.

Her Story. 1987.

Hidden in the Heart. 1991.

The God-Fearer. 1992.

Play

Radio Play:

The Caves of Adullan, 1972.

Other

No Further West: California Visited. 1959.

Time of Arrival and Other Essays. 1963.

The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and Its God. 1982.

Time and Time Again: Autobiographies. 1985.

Adult Pleasures: Essays on Writers and Readers. 1988.

The Electronic Elephant: A Southern African Journey. 1994.

Bibliography:

Jacobson: A Bibliography by Myra Yudelman, 1967.

Critical Studies:

"The Novels of Jacobson" by Renee Winegarten, in Midstream, May 1966; "Novelist of South Africa," in The Liberated Woman and Other Americans by Midge Decter, 1971; "The Gift of Metamorphosis" by Pearl K. Bell, in New Leader, April 1974; "Apollo, Dionysus, and Other Performers in Jacobson's Circus," in World Literature Written in English, April 1974, and "Jacobson's Realism Revisited," in Southern African Review of Books, October 1988, both by Michael Wade; "A Somewhere Place" by C. J. Driver, in New Review, October 1977; Jacobson by Sheila Roberts, 1984; "Stories" by John Bayley, in London Review of Books, October 1987.

There are three essential ingredients in the makeup of Dan Jacobson that have affected his writing profoundly: he is South African-born (and raised); he is Jewish, of East European extraction; and he has written virtually all his work in England. These facts about his background have become three primary factors underlying his work, and no account of it can ignore them without severe distortion. The first is undoubtedly the most significant, tending often to subsume either or both of the others. Jacobson has declared that he finds it hard to imagine he would have been a writer at all if he had stayed in South Africa. But it is impossible to imagine his writing without the stimulus given by the experience of South Africa, no matter how alienating—or even because of that very alienation.

It is obvious that Jacobson's sensibility has been influenced by England, not only by his domicile there for so much of his life but also by his earlier reading in the literature of England in the very different surroundings of a place like Kimberley. The striking contrast between two realities, the reality of what the young Jacobson saw around him in South Africa and the reality presented by his British-based reading, created in him what he has described as an almost metaphysical preoccupation, even as a child, with questions of reality. This has left him with a doubleness or split between his South African and his English selves that is very evident in his writing and is not necessarily a disadvantage. Though it can lead to a disabling self-consciousness—an over-awareness of self and worries about where this self does or does not fit in—it can also provide a creative tension, a fruitful interaction of two countries and cultures. A story dramatizing this division in the writer is "Fresh Fields," in which a dried-up older South African writer living in England tells a younger one, the narrator, to go home or he too will lose the ability to write. The older man then steals ideas for his poems from unpublished stories by the narrator, who finally hands over all his manuscripts and feels the burden of his past has been discarded, that he can stay in England and write there. This is what Jacobson himself has in fact done, but the burden of South Africa has never been entirely discarded. Indeed it makes itself felt in his fiction, novels as well as stories, of all periods. It is very rare for it not to be found in these fictions in some aspect of characterization, setting, theme, and reference.

Even when there is no necessity for a South African element to appear, one seems to force its way in. "Trial and Error" (also known under the title "Live and Learn") is such a story, with Jacobson's typical themes of family relationships, guilt and betrayal, possession and freedom. There seems to be no need for the characters to be South Africans living in England: the married life of the Bothwells, threatened by Jennifer's affair with a friend's husband and temporary abandonment of Arnold and their child, is the stuff of international soap opera and could as well be about Australians or Americans as Anglo-Africans. But that would not be true of Jacobson's imaginative vision, and once this is recognized the reader will see that it is unfair to imagine the realm of the story as other than it is, wrong to see it as not integral. The fact of the characters being South Africans in England is part of the loneliness as well as the pleasure and sense of discovery of the Bothwells. It partly accounts for the conclusion, when the strongest emotion Arnold feels after Jennifer's return is not love or hatred but "fear of being left alone."

But the most striking combination of ingredients in Jacobson's stories is not the South African and the English but the South African and the Jewish. Jacobson is an acute observer of the position of Jews in South Africa. Two of his works that trace the ambivalent relationships of Jews to other South Africans of all races are "The Example of Lipi Lippmann," about a hawker whose poverty first shames the other Jews of Lyndhurst (Jacobson's archetypal South African small inland town) and then shames and destroys himself, and "Droit de Seigneur," about a hotelier who kicks out two anti-Semitic Polish noblemen after one of them is caught in a compromising situation with a gentile guest. In "An Apprenticeship," about a young boy who falls in love with his school friend's mother, the narrator compares his own family in detail with the gentile Pallings, to whom he feels both superior (especially intellectually) and inferior (especially socially). One striking difference applies more generally: the Pallings do not share "the burden of guilt and sympathy towards the blacks which we bore as part of our Jewishness." It is this other burden, with its honorable tradition in the history of liberal Jews in South Africa, that lies behind a story like "A Day in the Country," detailing a confrontation between a Jewish and an Afrikaner family over the teasing of a black child. It also lies behind the two most powerful and best-known of Jacobson's stories: "The Zulu and the Zeide," with its touching relationship between the old grandfather (Yiddish zeide) and the young tribesman shining a revealing light on the dutiful relationships both have with old Grossman's son; and "Beggar My Neighbour" (also known as "A Gift Too Late"), poignantly showing the corruption of a possible friendship between a white boy and two black children by the gross inequalities of their situations.

The white boy in "Beggar My Neighbour" is not described as Jewish, and at this point it may be as well to turn the argument around: these stories, for all Jacobson's specific local and personal slants, are ultimately universal, their South African extremes and vividness, their Jewish nuances and humor, their English restraint and moderation combining in a wide humanity.

—Michael Herbert

JACOBSON, DAN

JACOBSON, DAN (1929– ), South African novelist. Jacobson was born in Kimberley. After graduating from the University of Witwatersrand, he went to London, where he taught in a Jewish school. He returned to South Africa, for a short time joining the family business in Kimberley, but finally settled in England in 1954 and held a chair at University College, London. Jacobson's writing first appeared in 1953 in the American Jewish monthly, Commentary, and he became a frequent contributor to many leading British and American periodicals. His fiction and much of his other writing is preoccupied by two major issues: the moral implications of apartheid in South Africa, and the problem of Jewish identity in the modern world. His first two novels, The Trap (1955) and A Dance in the Sun (1956), deal with the explosive aspects of apartheid, describing dispassionately the kind of incidents which characterize day-to-day relationships between whites and blacks in the rural areas of the Republic. Both novels are dramatic and symbolic in design. The Price of Diamonds (1957), set in a fictional version of Kimberley, deals with the illicit diamond trade in South Africa and its impact on the life of a middle-aged Jewish wholesaler. Although it presents a brilliantly comic study in frustration, like its predecessors it is very much a moral fable. Two later works in this genre are The Evidence of Love (1960), the story of an interracial love affair set against a background of hatred and false liberalism, and his autobiographical novel, The Beginners (1966). Many of Jacobson's polished short stories also deal with Jewish or South African themes. They include the collections A Long Way from London (1958), The Zulu and the Zeide (1959), which was also the basis for a musical play, and Beggar My Neighbor (1964). His novel The Rape of Tamar (1970) was based on the biblical story of *Amnon and Tamar. Jacobson's Evidence of Love was published in a Russian translation, a unique achievement for an Anglo-Jewish writer. In 1973 there appeared Inklings, a collection of short stories, and the Wonder-Worker, followed in 1977 by The Confessions of Josef Baisz and in 1991 by Hidden in the Heart.

bibliography:

R. Winegarten, in: Midstream, 12 (May 1966), 69–73.

[Michael Wade]

JACOBSON, Dan

JACOBSON, Dan. British (born South Africa), b. 1929. Genres: Novels, Novellas/Short stories, Poetry, Literary criticism and history, Travel/Exploration. Career: Stanford University, CA, Fellow in Creative Writing, 1956-57; University College, London, Lecturer, 1976-80, Reader, 1980-88, Professor, 1988-95; Emeritus Professor of English, 1995. Visiting Professor at US and Australian universities. Publications: The Trap, 1955; A Dance in the Sun, 1956; The Price of Diamonds, 1957; A Long Way from London, 1958; The Zulu and the Zeide, 1959; No Further West, 1959; Evidence of Love, 1960; Time of Arrival, 1962; Beggar My Neighbour, 1964; The Beginners, 1966; Through the Wilderness, 1968; The Rape of Tamar, 1970; Inklings, 1973; The Wonder Worker, 1973; The Confessions of Josef Baisz, 1977; The Story of the Stories, 1982; Time and Time Again, 1985; Her Story, 1987; Adult Pleasures, 1988; Hidden in the Heart, 1991; The God-Fearer, 1992; The Electronic Elephant, 1994; Heshel's Kingdom, 1998; (trans.) H. van Woerden, The Assassin: A Story of Race and Rage in the Land of Apartheid, 2001. Address: c/o A.M. Heath & Co Ltd, 79 St. Martin's Ln, London WC2N 4RE, England.