The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and Issy’s Coffee & Gift Shop invite you to a book launch for Darker Shade of Pale: Shtetl to Colony by Deborah Posel.

Darker Shade of Pale traces the journey of Jewish families from the Russian Empire to colonial South Africa. Through the story of her grandfather Maurice Posel – an ordinary man whose struggles and disappointments mirror those of countless others – Deborah Posel challenges the common narrative of Jewish immigrant success in South Africa, revealing a more complex and painful reality.

Part memoir, part global history, part meditation on inherited trauma, the book uncovers how preoccupations with status and success travelled from shtetl to colony, and the psychological costs they incurred: the traumas of dislocation, the weight of ambition, and the shame of failure. It explores the ironies of this journeying for literate, working women from the shtetl; the version of whiteness that South Africa assigned to Jews from Eastern Europe, the various ways in which Jews interacted with Black people, and some of the unexpected economic routes they chose, as well as the prejudicial punches that Jewish immigrants had to take – from both the British and the already-assimilated English-speaking Jewish community in South Africa.

Through one man’s unfulfilled hopes, Darker Shade of Pale asks what was truly given and what was taken in the making of new lives.

Deborah Posel is a sociologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town, founding director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and UCT’s Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA). She has written extensively on South Africa’s past and present, and on the making of its racial order.

Deborah will be in conversation with Tali Nates, Founder and Executive Director of the JHGC, and Courtneigh Cloud Bernstein.