Home Ground
A girl grows up in a theatrical Jewish family in Durban, under apartheid and largely oblivious to it.
Ruth Frank grows up in Durban in a household of theatre people, Jewish and English-speaking, insulated by class from the apartheid state operating around them, and leaves for America before understanding what she is leaving. Freed drew closely on her own upbringing, and the novel is unusually good on the specific self-deception of white liberal South Africans who considered themselves onlookers.
Recommended by 1 Person
Thomas Mallon
Freed, who died in May, was the greatest South African writer of her generation, and Home Ground is her most autobiographical novel. Her characters were always amazingly alive as individuals, and not mere political abstractions.
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