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Jewish themes and characters

Gordimer has occasionally given voice to Jewish characters, rituals and themes in her short stories and novels.

Kenneth Bonert, writing in The Forward, expressed the view that Jewish identity was rarely explored in her work: "For all of her Jewish heritage and personal connections (not only were her parents and family Jews, so were both of her husbands), overt signs of Jewishness are largely absent from her body of work. It’s impossible to guess from the books alone that Gordimer was Jewish; and it would be easy to assume the contrary, since whenever Jews do appear in her fiction, they tend to be seen through the eyes of a non-Jew, looking in with almost anthropological fascination onto an alien culture."

In The Later Fiction by Nadine Gordimer (Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), edited by Bryce King, Michael Wade fostered a discussion on Jewish identity as a repressed theme in Gordimer's novel, A Sport of Nature (1987): "Any exploration of the Jewish theme in Nadine Gordimer's writing, especially her novels, in an exploration of the absent, the unwritten, the repressed." Wade noted parallels between Gordimer's white, Jewish social milieu with those of Jewish writers living in urban areas on America's east coast: "Jewishness functioning as a mysterious but ineluctable cultural component of individual identity and expressed as an aspect of the nominally Jewish writer's particular, unique quest for identity in a heterogeneous society".

Benjamin Ivry, writing in The Forward, highlighted several examples where Gordimer employed Jewish characters and themes: "Gordimer proved that indeed anything was possible when examining the personal significance of Yiddishkeit."

In 1951, she wrote "A Watcher of the Dead" for The New Yorker. It centres on the death of a Jewish grandmother and her family observing the ritual of Shemira, as they arrange for a shomer to watch over the body from the time of death until burial. The story later appeared in The Soft Voice of the Serpent the following year.

In the same collection, Gordimer's story, "The Defeated" appeared. It follows the narrator's friendship with a young Jewish immigrant, Miriam Saiyetowitz. Miriam's parents operate a Concession store among the mine compound stores. They later study together at university to become teachers, and Miriam marries a doctor. The narrator visits Miriam's parents on an impulse at their store, they feel abandoned by Miriam, who rarely visits from Johannesburg with their grandson. The narrator explained "I stood there in Miriam's guilt before the Saiyetovitzes, and they were silent, in the accusation of the humble." For Wade: "Miriam's punishment of her parents for their otherness is severe and complete, and conceals Gordimer's own desire to avenge her sense of displacement on her parents for their otherness."

In her debut novel The Lying Days (1953), a major character, Joel Aaron, son of a working class Jewish shopkeeper, acts as a voice of conscience. He has progressive, enlightened views about apartheid. His ethical stances and sense of Jewish identity and ancestry impresses his non-Jewish white middle-class friend, Helen: "His nature had for mine the peculiar charm of the courage to be itself without defiance." Joel is known for his intelligence and integrity. In contrast to Miriam in "The Defeated", Aaron effortlessly accepts his parents and their background. He is a Zionist and makes aliyah to Israel.

In A World of Strangers (1958), there is less Jewish character development, with only a reference to an older man at a party with a thick Eastern European accent with an attractive blonde spouse. In Occasion for Loving (1963), a Jewish character, Boaz Davis appears, but for Wade: "the only Jewish thing is his name".

For Wade, Gordimer saw her father as the most emblematic symbol of Jewishness in her household: "she was compelled to make him both the sign of Jewishness and the object of her rejection." The Jewish otherness is also attributed to the patriarch in "Harry's Presence", a 1960 short story by Gordimer. It is notable as Gordimer's only treatment of the Jewish immigrant experience that does not include or mention black characters.

In 1966, Gordimer wrote an original story for The Jewish Chronicle. "The Visit" includes an extract from the Talmud and follows David Levy returning home from a Friday night Shabbat service. In the same year she published "A Third Presence" for The London Magazine. The story follows two Jewish sisters, Rose and Naomi Rasovsky. According to Wade: "The story's ending indicates that Gordimer has not yet broken through the wool-and-iron barriers of confusion and conflict aroused by the question of her Jewish identity."

In 1983, she published "Letter from His Father" in The London Review of Books, a response to Franz Kafka 's " Letter to His Father ". In the letter, Gordimer makes references to Yiddish, Yom Kippur, Aliyah, Kibbutzim and Yiddish theatre.

Hillela, a Jewish South African woman, figures as the protagonist of A Sport of Nature, (1987). Wade concluded: "By writing A Sport of Nature in the transcendent style she chose, she tried again to give meaning to her personal muddle over Jewish identity and experience, this time by creating Hillela, whose name represents the deepest moral and prophetic tradition in Jewish history, and who, united with Reuel (= Jethro), the great (not-Jewish) guide and adviser of the beginnings of that history, is able to resolve the inherent contradictions of (the writer's?) white-South-African-radical-Jewish identity. But Hillela is perhaps the most striking example in all Gordimer's writing of 'the Jew that went away', and it is not clear that she succeeds in creating the new sign she seems to have sought."

In the short story “My Father Leaves Home”, that appears in Jump: And Other Stories (1991), Gordimer describes an Eastern European shtetl, presumably the hometown of the title character. The anti-semitism the character faced in Europe makes him more sensitive to racism against black people in South Africa.

In Gordimer's final novel No Time Like the Present (2012), one of the central characters, Stephen, is half-Jewish and married to a Zulu woman. His nephew's Bar Mitzvah prompts a meditation on his own Jewish background and he fails to grasp his brother's embrace of Judaism.