In a Pale Blue Light by Lily Poritz Miller

Women’s Press, October 2009
Review by Mary Senior Harwood

Many books have been written about the Holocaust, but few, if any provide the added perspective of the extreme racial predjudice of South Africa in the same era.

Miller’s book reads much like memoir, with the slow pace that often accompanies that genre. We are pulled in through Libka, a teenager who has just lost her father. Her parents moved to South Africa in 1930, part of the last wave of Jewish immigrants out of Lithuania before Hitler’s occupation, and her mother has never fully assimilated to her new home. The family is distant – socially and geographically – from other Jewish families. Libka grieves by further withdrawing from her peers, which ultimately leads to expulsion from school and to a “school for difficult girls.”

Through Miller’s story, we experience a time period when Boers ruled roughly, with little difference between them and the Nazis the family left behind. Libka’s attachment to one of their black servants leads to trouble, as does her friendship with a Malay boy she meets on the beach. In each case, Libka looks beyond the racial barriers and sees the person within, whereas few other characters in the book see Libka for herself, not even her own family. Her brother Beryl is too wrapped up in himself and his social life outside the Jewish community. Her mother is withdrawn in her grief and sees little of her family other than the most immediate and basic needs of her growing family.

Sara, her mother, is advised by a rather well-drawn Mrs. Peker, a nosy, blousy woman who has decided to run Sara’s life. Mrs. Peker tells her to hire a man she knew in her shtetl (Yiddish for home town) to run the family factory. In her grief, Sara does not see beyond the man’s obsequious manner. At one point, he almost rapes Libka and is found to be a thief.

Throughout the story, Libka, through rebellious, is internal. She is not an active catalyst for change, like her friend Anya. The result is the one flaw I find in the book. The pacing is slow and the mood so internal that, especially in the beginning, it is difficult to get into the story. Very little happens for the first 50 pages, and at times throughout the book the writing bogs down, sounding almost like a translation to English. The author makes a liberal use of Yiddish and South African expressions throughout, and includes a glossary. While she does this to add authenticity, at times the phrases become barriers. No one likes to have to flip back and forth to a glossary to read a novel. This is one of those times when I could see how a little could go a long way.

In spite of the book’s shortcomings, it is a story that takes us to a world seldom shown in North American literature.