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"There were three other people present, or five, depending on whom one chooses to include... The ceremony lasted precisely thirty minutes, as had been agreed on well in advance, not a second longer."What kind of bar mitzvah lasts only thirty minutes? Which five people could have been present, and where could such a ceremony have taken place under these circumstances? As Denis Hirson gradually reveals the details of his extraordinary bar mitzvah, he explores the familial and political divisions that formed his story. Recreating 1960s Johannesburg through his adolescent eyes, Hirson writes of the silences that surrounded his Jewish heritage, and of the day that one of his family's secrets finally exploded. Witty and deeply poignant, My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah is a beautiful account of one man being confronted by his own past.

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.

Photo by Adine Sagalyn