Are you a stupid or a clever?
Such is the refrain in Isaac Helger’s
mind as he makes his way from redheaded hooligan to searching adolescent
to striving young man on the make. His mother’s question haunts every
choice. Are you a stupid or a clever? Will you find a way to lift your family out of Johannesburg’s poor inner city, to buy a house in the suburbs, to bring your aunts and cousins from Lithuania?Isaac’s mother is a strong woman and a scarred woman; her maimed face taunts him with a past no one will discuss. As World War
II approaches, then falls upon them, they hurtle toward a catastrophic
reckoning. Isaac must make decisions that, at first, only seem to be
life-or-death, then actually are.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s history, bound up with Europe’s but
inflected with its own accents-Afrikaans, Zulu, Yiddish, English-begins
to unravel. Isaac’s vibrant, working-class, Jewish neighborhood lies
near the African slums; under cover of night, the slums are razed, the
residents forced off to townships.
Isaac’s fortune-seeking takes him to the privileged seclusion of the
Johannesburg suburbs, where he will court forbidden love. It partners
him with the unlucky, unsinkable Hugo Bleznick, selling miracle products
to suspicious farmers.
And it leads him into a feud with a grayshirt
Afrikaaner who insidiously undermines him in the auto shop, where Isaac
has found
the only work that ever felt true. And then his mother’s secret, long
carefully guarded, takes them to the diamond mines, where everything is
covered in a thin, metallic dust, where lions wait among desert rocks,
and where Isaac will begin to learn the bittersweet reality of success
bought at truly any cost.
BOOKRIOT
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