My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah

A moving, witty memoir about a Jewish childhood in apartheid-era South Africa

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'Hilarious and heart-breaking. Hirson has the ability to evoke not just the city of his childhood, but his own thirteen-year-old voice and imagination of the world – with its perceptions, terrors and incomprehensions' William Kentridge

'This gem of a book is truly a gift for readers' Vrye Weekblad

'Poetic… The intensity and honesty Hirson brings to his narrative brings it close to the reader… Singular' News24

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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.