ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the most significant short stories written in Yiddish in South Africa. Eastern European Jews were familiar with legislated discrimination, but in South Africa those who suffered by it were-for them-alien people, set apart even in appearance, inhabiting a harsh and savage land. Two South African Yiddish writers in particular concentrated their literary gaze on apartheid: Richard Feldman and Nehemiah Levinsky. South African Yiddish writers made it easier for their readers to avoid guilt by presenting virtually all stridendy anti-black white characters in their stories as impoverished Afrikaner farmers. South African Yiddish stories stir immediate and genuine, rather than distant and artificial, anxiety in their treatment of plight of those South Africans who are the offspring of inter-racial sexual unions. The discriminatory treatment that apartheid meted out to this intercalary section of South Africa's population is more intensely felt by immigrant Jews-and hence vividly dramatized in their stories-because it makes Jews feel personally far more vulnerable.
