Dan Jacobson (7 March 1929 – 12 June 2014) was a South African novelist, short story writer, critic and essayist of Lithuanian Jewish descent.
Dan Jacobson was born 7 March 1929, in Johannesburg, South Africa, where his parents' families had come to avoid the persecution of Jews and to escape poverty in their European homelands.
His grandfather, Heshel Melamed, was a rabbi, and refused to leave Lithuania after traveling to the United States and finding that many Jews were not following their religion.
In his autobiography Time and Time Again, he refers to the many classes of people in his community: "The Africans lived either in rooms in the back yards of their employers' houses or in sprawling, dusty, tatterdemalion 'locations'; the Cape Coloureds (South African name for people of mixed race) lived in their parts of town; the whites in theirs.
As for the major division among the whites themselves, that between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking, or Briton and Boer.… All these peoples met in the streets, they did business with one another, but just about every aspect of their social life was severely segregated.
After helping a boy rescue his book bag from a filthy trash bin, he went to school unaware that he had gotten dirt on the back of his legs.
Paul Gready writes in Research in African Literatures: "A childhood experience of bullying and ostracism was something from which Jacobson was 'never to wholly recover."'
In less than a year, he was asked to leave, according to a published memoir, because he told the pupils about evolution, thereby contradicting the teachings of Orthodox Judaism.
He returned to Johannesburg in 1951 and worked for the South African Jewish Board of Deputies as a public relations assistant and then as a journalist for Press Digest.
During his time at Stanford, he completed his third novel, The Price of Diamonds, which was also set in South Africa but was a lighthearted comedy–mystery with a moral message.
In 1959, he received the John Llewelyn Rhys Award for fiction for his collection of short stories, A Long Way from London.
It dealt with the racism involved in a romantic relationship between a black man and a white woman who were put in prison for getting married.
In 1966, he published The Beginners, a longer, in-depth novel following the lives of a Jewish family after their emigration to South Africa.
Themes that continued to reveal themselves in his works included race relations, class consciousness, human nature, universal traits, group mentality, corruption, betrayal, guilt, power, and social morality.
In an article that he wrote for Commentary in 2000, entitled "My Jewish Childhood", Jacobson said: "It is always going to be difficult to get socially and racially diverse people to live harmoniously together within a single polity."
… The horror of the story lies not in gruesome details or heated prose, but in the calm truth of what we call normal behavior when we try to save our skin at any cost."
In 2000 he edited and translated from the Dutch Een mond vol Glas by Henk van Woerden, an imaginative re-creation of the circumstances leading to the assassination of the South African president Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, in the country's House of Assembly.
The orthodox rabbi Heshel Melamed's sudden death in 1919 had provided an opportunity for his widow and nine children to leave Lithuania for South Africa, which, in light of events two decades later, ironically, had been a gift of life.
"On his travels in Lithuania Jacobson finds scarcely any trace of his forebears, only signs everywhere of the annihilation from which Heshel's weak heart had preserved his immediate family when it stopped beating.