Denis Hirson: “They Called My Father A One-Man Revolution”

The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Denis Hirson’s My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah can be read as many different books. It can be read as a new, deeply personal, take on a pivotal episode in the history of South Africa. It can be read as a tender reflection on the mind of the author as he teetered on the cusp of adulthood. It can be read as a portrait of one particular wing of the Jewish diaspora, at one very particular moment in time. And it can be read as an account of how trauma is passed from one generation to the next, but also how with every new generation we are offered the opportunity of recovery…if only we will grasp it.

My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah focuses primarily on the life of the author in the early 1960s, when he was between the age of nine and thirteen, and when the politics of his homeland was in turmoil after the brutal Sharpeville Massacre, carried out by the apartheid regime. Indeed, it’s these very politics that are going to impose themselves in a real and immediate fashion on the author’s world, not only shattering his idea of family, of community, of home, but also setting his life on a course that will ultimately see him pitch up in Paris.

Buy My Thirty Minute Bar Mitzvah: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/my-thirty-minute-bar-mitzvah

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Denis Hirson has lived in France since 1975, yet has remained true to the title of one of his prose poems, ‘The long-distance South African’. Most of his nine books, both poetry and prose, are concerned with the memory of the apartheid years in South Africa. Two of his previous titles, The House Next Door to Africa and I Remember King Kong (the Boxer) were South African bestsellers. His most recent books are Ma langue au chat, sub-titled ‘tortures and delights of an English-speaker in Paris’, and a book of conversations with William Kentridge, Footnotes for the Panther.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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