Dan Jacobson’s passing leaves the world a poorer place

ROBYN SASSEN

Notoriously difficult to “place” as an author, Jacobson had a tendency to be chameleon-like in his ability to change tack as a writer. Beginning with fiction in his early years, he evolved to writing non-fiction in his later years. Making sense of his Jewish identity was always central to his oeuvre and his thinking.

One of four children to a Latvian father, Hyman who ran a butter factory, and a Lithuanian mother, Liebe (née Melamed), Jacobson, born on March 7, 1929, was raised in Kimberley in the Northern Cape. The family was relatively well-off and espoused liberal values in politics and religion.

Educated at the local boys’ high school in Kimberley, he graduated from Wits University in 1949, but the Big Hole in Kimberley was always present in his writing, manifesting as a pit or an abyss all his life.

At the age of 21 he made a commitment to London, but was lonely there, considering himself a “demi-alien”. It was there that he began his first novel, “The Wonder Worker” (1973) which casts an allegory over his London experiences.

After dismissal from his position at a Jewish boys’ school in London, for introducing Darwinian thinking into his teaching, he returned to South Africa, by which time, he was already publishing short fiction in important American magazines.

In 1954 he married Margaret Pye, from the then Rhodesia and moved with her to London. Armed with an already healthy critical reputation already in America, he elected to remain in exile from a hotly boiling apartheid South Africa, and developed a considerable body of fiction dealing with South Africa.

His magnum opus The Beginners (1966) which has been critically and intellectually compared to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, tells of a dynasty of Lithuanian Jews “beginning” over again in South Africa.

Also powerfully influenced by Czech Jewish writer Franz Kafka, 11 years later, Jacobson published The Confessions of Josef Baisz (1977), a fable set in an imaginary country.

Numerous awards and royalties as well as freelance journalism supported him until he was invited onto the academic staff of University College in London, where he was, for some years, a colleague of the writer AS Byatt.

As a lecturer, he viewed bad writing in harsh terms and was notoriously brutal with his blue pencil. In an academic framework, he had little patience for theory, and practised a level of literary criticism which was pragmatic and traditional.

In 1986, he became a professor; retiring as professor emeritus 12 years later. He loved the UCL environment.

Jacobson is survived by Margaret, his children, Jessica, Simon and Matthew, three granddaughters and two grandsons.