Published: 11 March 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
A FOUL-MOUTHED WANDERING JEWESS who traverses the ages. People who risk their lives to expose corruption. And a cartoonist-filmmaker whose father dreamed of raising a dentist. The subjects of three diverse books and writers.
Five years in the writing, The Gospel According to Wanda B. Lazarus (2020) started off as a creative writing master’s thesis at Johannesburg’s Wits University. Creating significant buzz, the book quickly made it to the prestigious list of recommended reads at major South African bookselling chain Exclusive Books.
Author Lynn Joffe was 55 when she embarked on her academic journey. An established copywriter, storyteller and head of an advertising agency, Joffe had long dreamed of writing a novel but never had the time.
She wanted the structure and discipline of the master’s. Timing also played a part. “As a woman, coming of age in myself gave me the confidence, the chutzpah and the self-belief to do this book,” she says. “I couldn’t have written it at 35.”
In Wanda, Joffe has crafted an unforgettable, exuberant protagonist who travels through seminal moments in history on a quest to become the tenth Muse (Greek mythology has nine Muses).
“I always wanted to explore the idea of the wandering Jew as a woman,” Joffe says. “The anti-Semitic trope that comes from the Middle Ages that was re-engineered backwards and forwards to blame the Jewish people for everything that went wrong with mankind.
[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="41582"]
“This fascinates me because I am a Jewish person and I can expropriate my own culture at will, which is what I have done, perhaps to the distress of certain more traditional thinkers!”
Yet in writing this book, Joffe says she unexpectedly found herself getting closer to her roots, culture and faith.
Joffe’s debut is filled with yiddishisms, humour and a lexicon unique to Wanda. Stephen Fry, the English actor, comedian and writer, wrote in his endorsement of the book: “The Gospel According to Wanda B. Lazarus is just what the world needs now.
“A fizzing, fulsome and fiercely funny heroine, and a novel charged with music, energy, bounce, juice and joy…. Lynn Joffe’s writing is so alive, and wicked, and mad and full of surprises.”
The response from Fry, who is Jewish, came after Joffe obtained his contact details and wrote him a carefully crafted email. He responded within 12 hours. “He’s fluent in Yiddish and we have a similar sense of humour,” she says. “I call him my fairy godfather.”
One of South Africa’s best-known investigative journalists and authors, Mandy Wiener has frequently dealt with quite different godfathers. In her bestselling true crime books, she has forensically exposed the inner workings of South Africa’s criminal underworld.
Last year saw the publication of her fifth book, The Whistleblowers, which delves into the stories of people who have exposed corruption at great personal cost and shines a light on the complicated nature of those who do what’s right even when they’re sometimes complicit in the wrongdoing they reveal.
Wiener, who hosts a radio news and current affairs show, The Midday Report, is drawn to stories most others shy away from. “I just can’t help it,” she says, speaking of her call to investigate some of the country’s most dangerous figures. “I’ve often said to myself, ‘I’m going to step away from organised crime’.
“My last book, Ministry of Crime, was very intense [because] I sat down with a lot of very well-known players, in both the police and the underworld. For this one, I wanted to do something less risky.
“Yet many of the whistleblowers were killed, many received death threats. So, I don’t think it turned out to be any less risky or controversial - it was possibly even more so.”
[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="41583"]
By digging into the lives of those who exposed some of South Africa’s biggest scandals, including corruption in politics and the corporate world and other shady dealings in the corporate and political realm, Wiener unearths the human stories behind the headlines.
“I’m always more interested in the people involved in the news so I wanted to sit down with them and hear what their experiences have been, what the cost has been and how they’ve been treated as whistleblowers in South Africa,” she says.
“Most of us don’t have a full comprehension of the price these people pay. I want to tell this story but I also hope that it brings about change in how whistleblowers are treated.”
As a white, Jewish woman working to expose the wrongs in South Africa’s notoriously unequal society, Wiener says she’s mindful of her privilege. “It’s something I have to check constantly - my lived experience and the lived experience of the people that I write about, and the people who read my books.”
Despite diving into its darkest depths, Wiener remains passionate about the country she calls home, and she advocates for active citizenship (people asserting their civic rights). “I think there’s a huge role for journalists to play in holding power to account.”
Also known for holding power to account, albeit through a different medium, is political cartoonist-turned-writer Dov Fedler. Having made a name for himself through his more than 50-year career as a cartoonist, most notably for The Star newspaper, Fedler released his second memoir Starlite Memories - Misadventures in Moviemaking, in 2020.
A follow-up to the successful Out of Line, the book juxtaposes Fedler’s childhood memories with his later disastrous foray into movie making.
“It started off with two separate ideas: my biography and the story of the movie but they soon converged into one book,” says Fedler, 81. “All of these memories just sprang to mind, and it came together.”
He also credits his daughter, Australian-based author Joanne Fedler, writer of international bestsellers including Secret Mothers' Business and Things Without A Name, with helping him structure the book. She is currently working to get the rights to publish Starlite Memories in Australia.
An ode to cinema and to life in Jo’burg between the 40s and mid-80s, the book provides a heady mix of nostalgia and Jewish humour. “When I thought about my history, I wanted to write the best chronicle of my childhood and the city that I grew up in,” Fedler says. “It’s a love story for me, of my background and of living in Jo’burg, my city.”
[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="41584"]
In choosing a title, Fedler channelled Woody Allen. “His film Stardust Memories was slammed by the critics of the time,” he recalls, “so it was Woody Allen’s failure and the Starlite cinema where my film premiered that made the title a natural choice.”
In the 1980s, he was tasked with writing and directing a crime comedy called Timer Joe Part Three. Fedler soon abandoned his starry-eyed perception of the world of filmmaking. The frustrations and misunderstandings that arose when he was confronted by a cast who only spoke Zulu were the stuff of comedy gold.
Yet, at the heart of the book are Fedler’s childhood memories, of his father who longed for a dentist son, his troublemaking brother, his beloved sickly mother and the way movies saw him through triumphs and tragedies. While the success of the widely praised book was hampered by the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s a great source of pride for him.
“Through all my cartoons and all my other projects, this book is the best thing that I’ve done. I don’t want to be known as Dov Fedler the cartoonist; I want to be known as Dov Fedler the writer.”
Main photo: From left, Lynn Joffe, Dov Fedler, Mandy Wiener
