Brief Hours and Weeks : My Life as a Capetonian - Emanuel Derman

Brief Hours and Weeks

My Life as a Capetonian

By: Emanuel Derman

Hardcover | 1 March 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover


$64.25

or 4 interest-free payments of $16.06 with

 or 

Available: 1st March 2025

Preorder. Will ship when available.

Brief Hours and Weeks is the author's account of growing up in a small, tightly knit, first-generation Polish-Jewish community in Cape Town in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

Observing through at first naive and then later more sophisticated eyes, he describes his childhood and youth in a protective off-the-boat immigrant Jewish family in very British-Commonwealth South Africa as apartheid becomes increasingly coercive.

Through vivid and candid personal stories, he brings to life a time, place, culture, people, and set of mores that no longer exist. At 21, he leaves Africa to study in America.

Industry Reviews

"Brief Hours and Weeks awakes many memories of Cape Town, the city of Emanuel Derman's youth and mine, as it was half a century ago. The chapter on the lonely Mrs Gold is a triumph." - J M Coetzee, Nobel Laureate

"What a delight. It succeeds in writerly craft, narrative, evocation of people, times and places and-not least-in authorial courage and candor."

-James Grant,

author of Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

"This is a touching, evocative (and beautifully illustrated) memoir, a vibrant portrayal of a vanished yet not wholly distant world. Emanuel Derman paints a convincing picture with great skill, candour and humanity. These are precious memories, which you will enjoy reading."

-Stefan Stern,

former Financial Times columnist and author

"Professor Derman writes with such honesty, openness and detail that I feel I may have developed false memories. 'But, Paul, you aren't Jewish and you've never been to Cape Town.' Now I'm not so sure."

-Paul Wilmott, mathematician, author and semi-professional controversialist

More in Biographies

HOPE : The Autobiography - Pope Francis

RRP $36.99

$33.25

10%
OFF
Gutsy Girls : Love, Poetry and Sisterhood - Josie McSkimming
Emperor of the Seas : Kublai Khan and the Making of China - Jack Weatherford
From Under The Truck : A Memoir - Josh Brolin

RRP $34.99

$31.75

Melania : A Memoir - Melania Trump

RRP $69.99

$49.75

29%
OFF
Murriyang : Song of Time - Stan Grant

RRP $39.99

$35.35

12%
OFF
Love Stories - Trent Dalton

Hardcover

RRP $34.99

$31.75

Wifedom : Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life : Our July Book of the Month - Anna Funder
Uses for Obsession : A Chef's Memoir - Ben Shewry

RRP $34.99

$33.25

The Gulag Archipelago : 1918-56 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

RRP $37.99

$33.90

11%
OFF