From fact to fiction in one Roundabout step

MOIRA SCHNEIDER

Although she began dabbling in fiction only after 45 years as a journalist, it wasn’t her original career choice, she said in public conversation with Hayden Proud at the launch. She had been considering medicine and fine art when then Cape Times women’s-page editor, Gertie Cooper, spoke at a careers evening at her school, Wynberg Girls High School.

“She told us that though she worked at a desk, every single day was different. I thought, ‘Ah, we’re onto something here’,” Durbach recalled.

Born in then-Salisbury (now Harare) in Zimbabwe, Durbach grew up in Zambia and Lesotho, following her civil-engineer father’s career path. She then studied journalism at Rhodes University in the inaugural class of the degree.

“I wanted to be like ‘Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter’,” said Durbach, referring to a series of books published in the 1960s.

In 1978, she was awarded a World Press Institute Fellowship that led her to travel to the United States and do an eight-month study tour of that country along with 11 other journalists from 11 countries. She came back to South Africa for two years, then returned to the US to serve as New York correspondent for the South African morning group newspapers, working periodically for the United Nations Department of Public Information.

Durbach married an American, Marshall Norstein. She lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with him and their son, Gabriel.

She wrote for the New Jersey Jewish News for 15 years from 2001, serving as bureau chief of its Central New Jersey edition and winning two New Jersey Press Association awards for her personality profiles.

“I like soft journalism,” she said, pointing out that she had interviewed “some marvellous people who had begun to speak out [about their Holocaust experiences] before it was too late – some of this experience filters into the book.”

Her novel, which is billed as “a love story of old doubts and new courage”, follows the lives of its two protagonists who meet as students at Rhodes University, and fall in love. Sally Paddington, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is Jewish, Felix Barnard isn’t.

It traces their separate journeys to the US, their marriages to other people, their chance meeting there decades later, and eventually settling down together in their senior years in the seaside village of Kalk Bay. Durbach concedes that the story partially draws from her own life.

“Though we experienced no direct loss in the Holocaust, I was touched deeply by the stories of Holocaust survivors in New Jersey,” where she has lived and worked for many years.

While Sally’s parents are Holocaust survivors, Felix has lost the love of his family, “so two very different sources of fear of loss come together”, she said. Touching on the theme of young love gone wrong, Durbach said that she had “some personal experience of that. I, too, reconnected with an old boyfriend in my early 60s, and we’ve become very good friends – much better than when we were involved.”

On switching genres from non-fiction to fiction, Durbach said that after 45 years of writing fact, she was “deeply committed” to it. “I didn’t think I’d manage fiction.

“I thought I’d start with just one line a day, and see what came to mind,” she said, quoting the Latin nulla dies sine linea (no day without a line) that she said set her on “the blissful path of fiction writing. By the fourth day, the characters were starting to dictate what would happen!”

Sally had been “embedded” in her mind for all those years since reading the series, while Felix was based partly on an old boyfriend, and partly on her present relationship.

“She’s an only child, her parents adore her, and whatever makes her happy, they’ll support, though they would have preferred a Jewish guy,” Durbach said. “But more than that, they want new life, the next generation.”

So when Sally decides to have an abortion, this becomes an “intense moral issue” for her. “She’s sure her parents would have accepted a new life, even from a non-Jewish partner. She changes her mind, partly because of fear that she’s letting them down.”

When Durbach started writing fiction, she wrote by hand in her son’s old exercise book, she told the audience. Since then, she has progressed to writing on her computer in coffee shops surrounded by people, something she describes as “my best thing”.

Roundabout is self-published. As she explains it, “I realised a love story written by a 66 year old wasn’t going to attract an agent.” But the marketing is another matter, she said, pointing out that word of mouth is “absolutely our oxygen”.

Durbach has authored two non-fiction works: With Mixed Feelings, a study of life during apartheid in the mixed-race areas of Cape Town, and The Wild Realms, an overview of South Africa’s different geographic regions.

• Roundabout is available from Clarke’s Bookshop in Cape Town, www.takealot.com, and Amazon.com.