Peter Kerr writes from New Zealand to recommend Albert Segal’s first (and apparently only) novel Johannesburg Friday:
This must be regarded as a “neglected book”. I came across it by chance in my grandfather’s bookcase.
Set in Jo’burg, possibly in the early Fifties, the book presents the points of view of four members of the Leventhal family on the Friday before a long weekend Yom Kippur. They are parents, Sophie and Sydney and the middle two of their children, Laurie (an apprentice druggist) and Jessie (a law clerk). The book has four chapters devoted to each. Each is beset by personal, spiritual, familial and societal considerations that are often at odds with the turbulent and tense struggle to maintain one’s ground in the big city; in this case it’s Jewish culture and religion that is at stake.
The mother is devoted to family but this devotion brings worries about status, money and its scarcity, her husband’s health and the decline in his fortunes, scandal and gossip and finding suitable Jewish matrimonial matches for her kids. She treats the Bantu servant, Sixpence as “too much of a nonentity to be regarded as a person”, vilely.
Laurie, the middle son, has caused consternation on two fronts. He wants to give up as an apprentice pharmacist and take up writing. This is anathema to parents who have scrimped and sacrificed to send him to college and, on qualifying, on the way to a status job (although not in the same league as a surgeon or medical specialist). The other front is Poppy Harris, a Gentile young woman who was once a boarder with the family. They are desperately hot for each other and desperate measures are adopted. Poppy is another source of loathing and denunciation for Mrs. Leventhal.
Mr. Leventhal is yet another cause for concern. As a young man he has prospered in real estate as the Witwatersrand gold fields burgeoned. Once married he rediscovers his religion. It brings him his greatest comfort and guidance. He has given away his prosperous career and now finds solace and a retreat in owning a shabby book-store in the city. He is aware that his decisions have brought economies to his family, about which he is concerned, but it is his Jewish faith and culture that predominate. He is a sad and fading personality.
Unlike the daughter, Jessie, who is fully alive, intelligent and capable in a variety of jobs in a male dominated commercial world. She works in a lawyers’ office, one of whom acts for Africans who suffer daily indignities. She is in love with the lawyer’s son, but this relationship has run into a Jew/Gentile impasse that causes her grief and resignation, at least from her job.
This is a very good book; it is a first effort for Segal, about whom I know nothing. The only disappointment is that no story can develop because the book’s structure is bound by the confines of a single day. The detailed characters embodied in the novel cry out for a plot or plots.
It’s interesting to know that Jo’burg was a tough dangerous city well before the 1970’s when the townships erupted in revolt. The likelihood of uproar and dispute in the street is ever present. We’re aware of an overriding suspicion between the different cultures and peoples who have washed up there. The same unease infects the Leventhal family. There’s a sense that it’s all a temporary set up. Unspoken thoughts will one day be realised.
I’d love to know more about Albert Segal. Did he write anything else? What became of him?
Peter thought that readers of NeglectedBooks.com might be able to shed some more light on Segal’s life and work.
There are at least a dozen copies of Johannesburg Friday available for sale, most of them fairly cheaply. The book was published in the summer of 1954 by Geoffrey Bles in the U.K. and McGraw-Hill in the U.S.. McGraw-Hill must have given its edition respectable marketing support, because reviews appeared in newspapers across the country as well as in a number of national magazines like Saturday Review.
In the New York Times, Ann Wolfe called it “Less of a novel than a Joycean close-up of a self-contained family,” a book in which Segal’s purpose was “to stage the inner drama of a simple family’s life,” but one enriched by its setting in a country where there were such dramatic differences in how different peoples were treated. The Kirkus Review credited Segal for a portrait of the Leventhals that was “virtually a biopsy” but concluded, “The fact remains that Segal has yet to learn to tell a story of some kind.”
Some reviewers were even more brutal. In The Baltimore Sun, Lynwood Kniesche called it “a singularly unremarkable book in almost every respect.” And he castigated Segal for how little about he incorporated his setting: “It may very possibly be that Mr. Segal, who was born and raised in this city, has, as a consequence, become either blind or blasé” to it. On the other hand, Barbara Merline of The Los Angeles Times, thought Segal had been very aware of the larger life of Johannesburg: “These four lives are ingeniously threaded into the seething torment of the city — a city driven by fear and hatred, a city in transition. The author keeps a fine balance between his characters and background in a warm and moving story.”
One noteworthy review appeared in the September 1954 issue of Jewish Frontier. In it, Harold U. Ribalow compared Johannesburg Friday with Nadine Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days. Of Gordimer, he wrote, “In her novel she revealed an unusual talent and showed once again that she wrote not only as a lyric artist, but as a woman aware of her Jewishness and the situation of the Jew in South Africa.” He was more critical of Segal’s book:
Nadine Gordimer indicates that she may yet produce the novel of Jewish life in South Africa. Although Albert Segal tries to do that in Johannesburg Friday, he does not quite manage it.
For one thing, Mr. Segal has attempted to write a novel with as little dialogue as possible. This makes for static story-telling and, alas, some dullness. Nevertheless, Mr. Segal is a talented writer and his characters do come to life….
Mr. Segal, in describing the cross-currents attacking Jew and Gentile, white and black, never forgets to reveal that his Jews are uneasy, uncomfortable and, in a deep sense, unhappy in South Africa.
Another interesting perspective is offered by the several reviews in journals aimed at black readers. In Jet magazine, its reviewer wrote:
Although Segal points up the plight of the African, he is overly careful in his handling of the European’s treatment of the black majority. An African is caught stealing a purse from Jessie and is turned loose at her request. An African servant rapes a white girl and is sentenced to the gallows, but the judge sympathizes with “any man whose passions might be whipped up during the course of his duties,” and breates white women’s behavior before African men. Johannesburg Friday is rich in excursions into Jewish living, but the telling is in such detail that action sometimes drags, interest lags.
In Phylon, a literary journal from the historically black Clark University in Atlanta, John Reinhardt wrote:
Segal has deliberately minimized externalities and concentrated on the com- plex emotions sustaining the seemingly trivial actions. The introversion and rigidity of Mrs. Leventhal, the ambivalence and paranoia of Max, and the estrangement and anxieties of son and daughter determine the life of this family and at the same time seem to symbolize the seeds of turmoil in a seething continent. Especially is this true when the passions and impulses of whites and blacks are juxtaposed. The native servants remain inscrutable to the Afrikaners, despite the certainty of the latter that oversimplified and obvious assessments suffice to account for the African’s bitterness. Not always satisfied by easy appraisals, Mrs. Leventhal longed for “an insight into the workings of their minds.” And in their minds resides much of the worth of Johannesburg Friday, though it is by their brawn that Johannesburg judges all issuing from the Zulu- land kraals. That her servant, Sixpence, represents more than a simple cluster of biological facts never occurs to Mrs. Leventhal. “If ever she believed him to be a human being, endowed with feelings and impulses and sensitivities, she disguised it from both herself and him.”
In the Journal of Negro Education, Mark Watkins of Howard University wrote:
The lives of these people are affected by much of what is Johannesburg, especially the struggles of the Jewish minority in the face of the ill-concealed disparagement of the gentile majority, the problem of the Bantu in the city, and the general turbulence of the times. This is a realistic exposure of human problems in a modern industrial and ethnically complex community. It is focused on Jews in the local setting of South Africa’s great commercial center, but it also is a rather good portrait of human nature and personality in general.
I’ve been able to find no trace of Albert Segal after the appearance of Johannesburg Friday (though I have not attempted to see what might be available through South African sources). If anyone knows more, please let us know using the comment feature below.