Rose Zwi

From her obituary in Bookseller & Publisher October 2018

Spinifex Press publisher Susan Hawthorne writes:

‘I first met Rose Zwi through her manuscript The Umbrella Tree, when I encountered it in the Penguin unsolicited manuscript pile. I recall being impressed by the understated power of her writing. So when Spinifex was established in 1991, I was thrilled to learn that Rose was writing another novel.

‘Rose Zwi’s parents lived in Lithuania and escaped when the Germans began to kill Jews. They fled to Mexico where Rose was born but soon after moved to South Africa where Rose grew up in the small Jewish community that flourished there. These themes would be the ones Rose followed in her fiction and her works of history … Her writing is nuanced and makes important connections between the Holocaust and Apartheid through the stories of families and individuals who were either complicit or rebelled against oppression.

‘The book that Rose described as her “life’s work” was a work of history. Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (1997) concerns the Jews of Lithuania. In the early 1990s, when Rose visited her parents’ home town Zagare near the Latvian border, she discovered that there was just one Jew living in the town. He said to her that he wanted to remind the other townspeople of the tragedy of World War II.’

(Image credit: Sharon Zwi.)

Rose Zwi was born in Mexico, lived in London and Israel, but spent most of her life in South Africa. She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1967 with an honours degree in English Literature. She died in Sydney in 2018, aged 90.

For several years she worked as a literary editor at Ravan Press in Johannesburg, and was an active member of Black Sash, a civil rights organisation, until she immigrated to Australia in 1988.

Rose won several prizes for her work, including the 1994 Human Rights Award for her novel Safe Houses, and the Olive Schreiner Award for Another Year in Africa. Last Walk in Naryshkin Park was short-listed for the NSW Premier's History Award, and Speak the Truth, Laughing was short-listed for the Steele Rudd Award for the best book of short stories for 2003.

Translations