Denis Hirso

Writing about his life in South Africa is Denis Hirson’s way of staying and keeping the connection vital, writes

My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah ★★★★★ Denis Hirson, Jacana Media

The still, sweet air surrounds us, and the sun filters through the leaves. It is a spirit-lifting feeling that only the late highveld summer brings to those who pay attention to its moods. Denis Hirson peers over his teacup at me. “Look at this weather,” he says. “And listen to the rain last night, and look at the energy and the fumbling generosity and the openness and all the issues up on the surface.” He falls silent.

I think of the second sentence of his compelling memoir, My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah: “It took place on a cool crisp afternoon in Johannesburg on the day I turned thirteen, towards the end of August 1964.”

Hirson was forced to leave South Africa with his family in 1973 at the age of 22. His father, Baruch Hirson, an activist for the African Resistance Movement, spent nine years in prison for sabotage. Largely for blowing up electricity pylons in protest against apartheid, an act which holds a vicious irony for us in our tortured present.

Hirson didn’t want to go. He went because his father had to. “It felt like being with a man whom I was supposed to love, and didn’t know how to, much more than anything to do with any country.”

Today, as we sip tea under the oaks at Johannesburg’s Wits University, his connection with South Africa is still vital. He has written six other memory books, all of them “coming out of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, all coming out of that mangled period, all of them looking at the different layers of experience, through the personal to what was happening to a political party in South Africa”.

“I would never say I was an exile.” For him, writing about that time is core to his identity. “This is my way of staying. It was saying ‘goodbye’ and saying I wanted to stay.”

But his everyday life is in Paris now, with his wife and two children. And it was Anna, his daughter, in preparing for her bat mitzvah, who prompted him to look more deeply into his strange, painful bar mitzvah. The story of that agonisingly long, yet bitterly short moment is at the heart of this book. Hirson leads us skilfully through the memories of an almostforgotten Johannesburg into the very essence of his being.

I kept turning the pages, wanting to know what really happened, while with clear, robust sentences, he lets us into his inner life, step by step. Sometimes wistful, sometimes angry, but never bitter. He charts a passage for us from being a child confused by the real physical peril of living through his parents’ political involvement, coupled with their rejection of Judaism, to finding a deep acceptance of his Jewishness, and an inner reconciliation with his father’s past and the suffering it created for him.

“A parent can never be perfect,” he says quietly. “The trauma of that moment is still with me, but trauma doesn’t put you at the centre of the world, it turns.” He pauses. “But what happened here was the nexus of it all. That was what had to be dealt with in writing. Trauma is a form of identity. It’s a source of energy, if you can use it; otherwise it’s going to use you. It’s something I can tap, and it rooted me here.”

It is a quiet epiphany of hope, like the book itself. A still point of pain expanding and transforming into acceptance through his story into our lives.

The leaves on the trees cast their fleeting shadows over his face. “It’s one thing to write on the surface of what you’ve seen or heard. It’s another to take it into your deepest place and see what it means to the substance of your spirit.”

The world has turned innumerable times since he was forced to leave this country. But he has gifted us a powerful song of self, of contrapuntal notes of memory and shadow flickering through his life, like the benediction of the highveld sun that he has always carried with him, through time and out into the world.