CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Strangers in a Strange Land: Dennis Walder and His Secret Jewish Mother

The Algerian-born French novelist, Albert Camus, a pied-noir, began his existentialist classic, The Stranger, with the now memorable words, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. I received a telegram from the old people’s home: ‘Mother deceased.’” Camus would add, “In our society, any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.”

Dennis Walder, channeling Camus, wrote colloquially in the opening paragraph of his newly published memoir, Amid the Alien Corn, “Mom died yesterday.” It’s not easy to compete with Camus, but Walder tries his level best. “Mom” works better for him than Camus’ “mother.”

The title for Walder’s book comes from John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” in which the poet valorizes the Biblical Ruth, a Moabite who marries an Israelite. She is “sick for home” and stands “in tears among the alien corn.” (The Biblical Ruth became the great-great-grandmother of King David.) Walder’s elusive, secretive mother is a kind of Wandering Jew without a real home who lives and dies largely a stranger to herself and her son.

The strange land in which mother and son exist as aliens is South Africa, a place of spectacular beauty in which a small white minority controls much of the destiny of the Black majority that acquiesce under the heel of a tyrannical regime and also rebel against it. Walder is an eyewitness to the traumatizing and liberating events of contemporary history in Europe as well as in Africa; empires collapse, fascism rises and falls, workers cry for their rights and ideas and philosophies like existentialism and Marxism come and go. Walder carried on. Colonized South Africa was not unlike colonized Algeria and so the nod to Camus seems apt.

The narrator doesn’t participate directly in the flux of events, but rather remains on the sidelines, observing and recording what he sees and hears. Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko,  F. W. De Klerk, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev and others flicker across these pages and bring newspaper headlines to life.

Not long ago, I met Walder at a conference in Leeds, England and discovered that we shared a fascination with postcolonial fiction and the work of Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning author who was born in what was then Persia and who was raised in Southern Rhodesia before she settled in London in the late 1940s. The other day, Walder sent me a signed copy of Amid the Alien Corn. He included a note in which he said he’d been reading from his book to a “large Jewish community” in North London, where it was praised as a “fine example of life writing.”

I read the 377-page book in several sittings, and appreciated his disclosure in the acknowledgements that a cousin named Margot Merlin made him “realize the importance of remembering those lost in the Holocaust.” One would have thought that that realization had guided him all along. Apparently not.

In his opening chapter, Walder explains that when his sister told him of their mother’s death and the funeral, he “burst into tears, which dried quickly, making me wonder........

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