A Path through Hard Grass: A Journalist's Memories of Exile and Apartheid

A Path through Hard Grass is journalist Ruth Weiss's Memories of Exile and Apartheid in South Africa.
Weiss, Ruth
23556
978-3-905758-39-9
In stock
new
€29.95 *

Title: A Path through Hard Grass
Subtitle: A Journalist's Memories of Exile and Apartheid
Author: Ruth Weiss
Genre: Biography
Series: Lives Legacies Legends
Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien
Basel, Switzerland 2014
ISBN 9783905758399 / ISBN 978-3-905758-39-9

Softcover, 17 x 24 cm, 276 pages, several b/w photos

Beschreibung:

From the foreword by Nadine Gordimer: The writer of this book is one of that company whose very existence hangs by a question that can never be answered. Why did the little girl escape an end to life in a gas chamber, almost before it began? Why did her parents take lonely flight with her to an unknown country, just in time, while others lingered fatally? Fate, destiny, we do not know from where the instinct for survival comes, the very antithesis of the homing instinct. To leave home is to live. But not necessarily happily ever after. Ruth Weiss found herself growing up in a country where the mark of the victim was not the yellow star but the black skin. Being white, she could have been content, in South Africa, with being accepted for full citizenship denied to blacks. Although there was poverty in the immigrant family, she had the automatic privilege of superior, whites-only education. Being white, she could have taken unquestioningly, for the whole of her life, the automatic privileges of segregated transport, Ibraries, theatres, hotels, freedom to live and seek what employment she pleased wherever she wished, something again denied, to blacks. But what emerges in the gentle voice of this strong and striking autobiography is a girl and then a woman who took on the responsibilities of her situation in a country of adoption just as if she had been born to that situation. And furthermore, as many, many whites born to it have not.

Inhalt: A Path through Hard Grass: A Journalist's Memories of Exile and Apartheid

Foreword by Nadine Gordimer
A Note Regarding Language
Prologue
From Fürth to Johannesburg
An unjust Soceity
New Customs
Teenage Years
Johannesburg, Jewburg, and E'Goli
Troubled Years
Experience with Boers
The Fifties
A New Beginning
Career Moves
The Sixties
Flight and Travel
New Friendships and Love
Fleet Street, Salisbury, London
Zambia - Life in a Frontline State
Voice of Germany
London and Lancaster House
An Unusual Journey
Zimbabwe
South Africa
Later Years
Postscript
Acronyms and Abbrevations
Photographs