Dan Jacobson
| Dan Jacobson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
7 March 1929 Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Died | 12 June 2014 (aged 85) Lyndhurst Gardens, Hampstead, London, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | South African |
Dan Jacobson (7 March 1929 – 12 June 2014) was a South African novelist, short story writer, critic and essayist.
Dan Jacobson was born 7 March 1929, in Johannesburg, South Africa, where his parents' families had come to avoid the persecution of Jews and to escape poverty 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 Hirsh Jacob, and a younger sister, Aviva. His mother's family emigrated 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 in his memoir "Heshel's Kingdom" about his travels back to Lithuania to find out more information about his grandfather.
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 influence. 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."'
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