A girl from a mining town
Nadine Gordimer was born on November 20, 1923, in Springs, a gold-mining town on the East Rand outside Johannesburg. Both her parents were Jewish immigrants. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, had come to South Africa from the Baltic region of the Russian Empire at thirteen; he was a watchmaker who travelled from mine to mine fixing watches and later opened a jewellery shop. Her mother, Nan Myers, came from an established Anglo-Jewish family in London and had arrived in South Africa as a small child.
The home was secular. Her father, raised Orthodox, went to synagogue alone on the High Holidays, and Nadine was given no Jewish education. Her mother, though not religious, cared deeply about the poverty of black South Africans and founded a crèche for black children. As a teenager Nadine saw police raid the family home and search the room of a black servant, an early lesson in how the state treated the people who did its work.
Writing in isolation
When Nadine was about eleven, her mother, convinced that the girl had a weak heart, took her out of the Catholic convent school she attended in Springs. For the next five years she was largely kept at home, isolated from other children. She read voraciously and began to write. At thirteen she had a story published in the children’s section of a Johannesburg Sunday newspaper, and at fifteen her first adult story appeared in Forum, a liberal South African magazine.
She spent a single year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where for the first time she mixed with people across the colour bar. Through the writers and artists around Drum magazine and the lively township of Sophiatown, she said, she was brought “out of whiteness into humanity.” She moved to Johannesburg in 1948, published her first collection of stories, Face to Face, in 1949, and in 1951 began a long relationship with The New Yorker. Her first novel, The Lying Days, appeared in 1953.
The novels that exposed apartheid
Over the next sixty years Gordimer published fifteen novels and many collections of short stories, and almost all of them dealt with the way apartheid shaped the lives of everyone in South Africa, black and white, in public and in the most private moments. A World of Strangers (1958) and Occasion for Loving (1963) explored friendships and love affairs across the colour line in an increasingly repressive state. A Guest of Honour (1970), about a returning colonial official caught up in a new African nation, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
The Conservationist (1974), seen through the eyes of a wealthy white industrialist whose farm is haunted by the body of an unknown black man, shared the Booker Prize. Burger’s Daughter (1979), written after the Soweto uprising, follows the daughter of two communist anti-apartheid revolutionaries and was, Gordimer said, a coded homage to Bram Fischer, the lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela. July’s People (1981) imagined a white family fleeing a revolution and depending for survival on their black servant, turning the master and servant relationship upside down. Later novels, including My Son’s Story (1990), about love in an unbearable society, None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998) and The Pickup (2001), carried her searching, unsentimental gaze into the years of transition and into democratic South Africa, where she showed that the legacy of the past was still palpable.
Banned at home, read abroad
The apartheid government understood the power of her books. The Late Bourgeois World was banned for a decade, A World of Strangers for twelve years, and Burger’s Daughter was banned within a month of its publication in 1979 before an appeal board reversed the decision. Gordimer pointed out that the board banned two books by black writers at the same moment it released hers, and she never stopped arguing that censorship fell hardest on black authors.
She fought censorship as well as enduring it. She served on the steering committee of South Africa’s Anti-Censorship Action Group, was a founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, which nurtured young black writers, and became a vice president of International PEN. She refused to let the state broadcaster air her work and declined an honorary doctorate from a South African university while accepting many from abroad. For readers around the world, her stories were among the clearest windows into what apartheid really meant in daily life.
In the struggle
The arrest of her close friend Bettie du Toit in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre that year drew Gordimer into active politics. She was close to Mandela’s defence lawyers, Bram Fischer and George Bizos, and helped Mandela edit his famous “I Am Prepared to Die” speech from the dock at the trial that sent him to prison for life in 1964. She hid activists in her home to help them escape arrest, and in the late 1980s she testified at the Delmas Treason Trial in mitigation for anti-apartheid activists convicted there, which she later called the proudest day of her life.
She supported the African National Congress through the decades when it was banned and became a card-carrying member after it was unbanned in 1990. She was never an uncritical loyalist: she argued that people should join organisations in order to change their flaws, and in later years she publicly criticised the ANC government, opposing President Thabo Mbeki’s stance on AIDS and condemning its Protection of State Information Bill in The New York Review of Books in 2012. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, she was among the first people he asked to see.
The Nobel Prize
On October 3, 1991, Gordimer became the first South African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy said that through her magnificent epic writing she had, in the words of Alfred Nobel, been of very great benefit to humanity. It praised her for writing with intense immediacy about the complicated personal and social relationships around her, and for books that, by giving profound insight into history, helped to shape it.
In her Nobel lecture, Writing and Being, she argued that a writer serves humankind only by telling the truth, even against the writer’s own loyalties, and against the dirtying of language for racism, sexism and domination. The prize came as apartheid was collapsing, and it gave international weight to a lifetime spent insisting that the fate of black South Africans was the central moral question of her country.
A Jew without religion
Gordimer identified herself as Jewish by birth, once calling herself “a Jew forever,” but she had no religious belief and took no part in Jewish communal life, although both her husbands were Jewish. In her mid-thirties, feeling a lack in herself, she read about the world’s religions and for the first time learned something of Judaism, the faith of her parents, but she said she could not take the leap of faith. She felt that her moral values came from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
She was impatient with the idea that her opposition to apartheid came from belonging to a persecuted people. All decent people, she argued, whatever their background, have an equal duty to fight evil, and to say otherwise concedes too much. She could be critical of Israel but rejected comparisons between its policies and apartheid, and in 2008 she resisted calls to boycott a writers’ conference in Jerusalem, saying that peace could only begin with both sides talking to each other.
A private life in Johannesburg
In 1949 Gordimer married Gerald Gavronsky, a dentist; their daughter, Oriane, was born in 1950, and they divorced within three years. In 1954 she married Reinhold Cassirer, an art dealer from the German-Jewish Cassirer family who set up Sotheby’s in South Africa. Their son, Hugo, became a filmmaker in New York, and the marriage lasted until Cassirer’s death in 2001.
She guarded her privacy fiercely and wrote that nothing factual she said would be as truthful as her fiction. For more than fifty years she lived in the same house in Parktown, Johannesburg, refusing to move into a gated complex even after robbers attacked her there in 2006. She refused to be shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 1998 because it was open only to women, and in 2004, in her eighties, she gathered about twenty major writers to contribute stories to Telling Tales, a book that raised money for the Treatment Action Campaign’s fight for HIV and AIDS treatment in South Africa.
Legacy
Nadine Gordimer died in her sleep at her Johannesburg home on July 13, 2014, at the age of 90. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and she received honorary doctorates from many universities, the French Legion of Honour and honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her lasting contribution was to make the world see apartheid from the inside. Through fiction rather than slogans, she showed millions of readers how a system of racial domination corrupts the people who benefit from it as well as those it crushes, and she helped build the international moral case against it. At home she defended the freedom to write and read, and supported black writers when the state tried to silence them. She remains a model of the engaged writer who puts truth above comfort, loyalty or safety.
Sources & further reading
Nadine Gordimer, Wikipedia · Nadine Gordimer, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive · The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991, press release, NobelPrize.org · Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Lecture: Writing and Being, NobelPrize.org · Nadine Gordimer, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.