My parents were South African Jews. They'd come from Lithuania, [but] they grew up [in South Africa]. My dad came to England as a young doctor at the end of World War II, then went back. And he abhorred apartheid. He was actually the dean of the last black house within the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. And then he saw how, as a result of apartheid, black students were no longer able to attend, and that for him was the last straw.
I lived there as an infant and then would go back every year, and there was always this faint menace in the horizon. That blacks were going to rise up and sweep away these beautiful homes where I stayed in Johannesburg. And I remember cousins saying to me, "Enjoy the swimming pools — next year they'll be red with blood." And I didn't quite get it. Sometimes I would sit on the wrong bench or wander into the wrong place. Because I was part of South Africa, but I wasn't from there.
And of course, one of the particularities of apartheid was that blacks were banished except in the most intimate of settings: the home, the family. More or less every white family had black staff. And I would wonder why these utensils were set apart, and I would see [the black workers] going to sleep in these little concrete outhouses with their baleful single windows. So there was this combination of intimacy, of closeness, and of threat, fear, menace, always out there. It gave me a profound abhorrence of this evil.
You know, I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I don't think Israel practices apartheid ... When it comes to Palestinians, some people use that phrase. But there are echoes. You know, when you're in the West Bank, and you're on the road, and it says, "Only for Jews, only for settlers, only for Israelis and not for Palestinians," those echoes are there. And it's one of the reasons why I'm a Zionist who believes very strongly that Zionism must involve two states for two peoples.
On coming to America, and whether it's easier to assimilate here
It is easier ... that's why I love it. That's why I became an American citizen. You can't imagine what a relief it was as a Jew to arrive in New York City.
The bright star, as I think I put it in the book, of immigration, of moving on, is new opportunity. And its black sun is loss. The loss of a home, the loss of a country, the loss of a community. And for some people, the project of beginning again is overwhelming. It's too much. That was the case with my mother. Even in America, for me, it's hard.
But even the most open of European societies has nothing like the openness of the United States, which is a country that is still — in my view — endlessly enriched by immigration.
Read an excerpt of The Girl from Human Street
bipolar disorder
South Africa
New York