Nadine Gordimer — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Nadine Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 in Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg in the Transvaal, the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer (1887-1962) and Hannah "Nan" Gordimer, née Myers. Her connection to the Russian Empire runs through her father.
Isidore Gordimer was a Jewish watchmaker and jeweller who came to South Africa from the Russian Empire at about thirteen. Sources differ on where he came from: Wikipedia and the Dictionary of Literary Biography give Žagarė, a Lithuanian town near the Latvian border, then in the Kovno Governorate; others say Latvia or Riga. The Lilly Library, which holds her papers, records that he left as a teenager to escape pogroms and poverty. Her mother had come to South Africa from London as a child with her parents, from an assimilated Jewish family, and Nadine was raised in a secular household. Gordimer later described a class difference between her artistic mother and her working father. Her mother died in 1973 or 1976, sources differ, and only afterwards did Gordimer speak publicly about her childhood.
She attended the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy in Springs until, at about eleven, her mother took her out of school because of an illness; it was then that she began to write. She was writing seriously by her teens, and her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), is set in Springs. Over six decades she published novels and many collections of stories, much of her work examining life in South Africa under apartheid; several of her books were banned there, and she was a prominent member of the Anti-Censorship Action Group.
She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Guest of Honour in 1971 and was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist. Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981) followed, and she won the Central News Agency Literary Award four times. On 3 October 1991 the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing her magnificent epic writing as of very great benefit to humanity, in the words of Alfred Nobel. Her papers, some 6,800 items, are held at the Lilly Library of Indiana University.
She died in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg on 13 July 2014, aged ninety.
Tracing the roots — Žagarė or Riga (sources differ)
Gordimer was born in Springs, Transvaal, on 20 November 1923. Her father, Isidore Gordimer (1887-1962), was a Jewish watchmaker who came to South Africa at the age of thirteen; Wikipedia gives his home town as Žagarė (Lithuania), the Jewish Women's Archive as Riga (Latvia), both then in the Russian Empire. Her mother, Nan Myers, was born in England to an Anglo-Jewish family.
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Žagarė or Riga (sources differ). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The tension between standing apart and being fully involved — that is what the writer's life is."