Quintessentially Jewish book wins Alan Paton Award

OWN CORRESPONDENT

What inspired you to write Everyone is Present? The project grew out of my multimedia art practice, which has always focused on vernacular and family photography, particularly the way in which these photographs mediate the stories we tell ourselves about the past. My aim was to try writing as an approach to certain preoccupations with the dark history of 20th century Europe that have been with me for as long as I can remember. My family came to South Africa in 1942, as refugees from Central Europe. Their lives had been disrupted by racism, discrimination, and ultimately genocide, and they lost their home, friends, families, possessions, and professions. The past was never discussed, but the intergenerational transmission of their traumatic experience was powerful, and always felt a part of me at a “cellular” level. I was driven by a need to attempt a retrieval of sorts. Through a forensic examination of photographs and other family objects with their origins in the past, I try and go back through three generations to where something once was.

Describe your thinking from conceiving the idea to actually sitting down to write the book. I have my mother, Leonia Kurgan, to thank for handing me the gift that ultimately became this project. She was four years old when they fled Poland, and had often told me her own version of certain stories, and those she didn’t tell or know, were certainly delivered at birth into my unconscious! But she also preserved her father’s photographs, diaries, and papers, and spent years working on her own memoir. My grandfather was a melancholy, introspective intellectual, and kept daily diaries from the first day of World War II until he died in 1973 in Cape Town. When my mother handed me guardianship of his personal effects, I began to think about writing in relation to his writing and photographs, and started the process of raising funds to have all 35 years of the diaries translated. His photographs, which I had worked with in a range of museum and gallery exhibitions over the years, had always compelled me, because they brought into view a striking gap between what I saw and what I knew, and therefore invited me to imagine experiences and stories that had resisted integration into the story my family had always told itself about itself. This treasure trove of material suggested many different paths, and in order to design a manageable project, I decided to limit myself to the writing and images that he made during the years 1939 to 1945.

What was the most surprising thing you uncovered in your research? On a research trip to Poland, I came across an audio archive of Holocaust-survivor testimonies, recorded in the 1990s, which had never been made available online. Among them was a recording made by my mother’s cousin Arthur, whose childhood memory of a single fact – the name of the hotel they had holidayed in year after year in the Tatra mountains – enabled me to construct the first three essays of my book. I had grown up with the story, “During the war, after their parents were shot by the Gestapo, ten-year-old Arthur walked his six-year-old sister all the way across Europe to family in London.” In fact, their parents had sent their two young children into hiding alone – they had no choice – and were hiding elsewhere in the city under even more difficult circumstances. Among other things, the recordings describe two years of the young children enduring deprivation and suffering during which time Arthur took heroic responsibility. Although they didn’t know it, their parents had indeed been rousted out of their hiding place and shot by the Gestapo. This was a surprising discovery, and important for me because my book elucidates how difficult it is to arrive at the truth. It’s precisely about the facts and the fiction that eventually become family truths. The story of Arthur’s courage and daring had been invented so that it fit him perfectly.

How did you find yourself on the Alan Paton Award shortlist? Were you nominated by someone? Publishers are invited to submit nominations to the Sunday Times. Some months later, a long list of twenty-five books is announced. Two months later, that list is pared down to a shortlist of five books. I was over the moon to discover I had made that cut!

What do you believe the appeal of your book is for a Jewish audience? My book tells a story that many second and third-generation South Africans with roots in Eastern and Central Europe will strongly relate to. It also recreates and evokes an unusual aspect of Jewish secular life before the war in Poland.

What do you believe is the appeal for a general audience? The book also engages with universal contemporary themes and concerns, and tells a compelling story about racism, migration, love, and secrecy, which is at the same time an analysis of memory and family photographs. It’s also a detective story!

Why do you believe it was chosen as the non-fiction book of this year? It would be wonderful to know what the judging panel might have said and thought about my book. But in the absence of that, I presume it met the following published criterion: “The Alan Paton Award will be bestowed on a book that presents the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable, and fly in the face of power … and that demonstrates compassion, elegance of writing, and intellectual and moral integrity.” Looking at this again, I feel totally elated that my book won.

What does winning the Alan Paton Award mean to you? It’s the greatest honour, and so affirming to have been added to the company of the many extraordinary writers who have previously won what is considered to be the most prestigious literary accolade in the country. And then, I think, it will make raising funds to research and write the next book a little easier!

• Everyone is Present is published by Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg. To order the book in South Africa, email sales@jacana.co.za, or you can buy it at independent bookstores Love Books in Johannesburg, and Clarkes Bookshop and The Book Lounge in Cape Town. To order the book internationally, email idea@ideabooks.nl, or buy it off amazon.com