Claudia Braude has courted controversy before in writing about the responses of the South African Jewish community to apartheid, sharply criticising the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the Orthodox rabbinate.’ While outwardly this anthology is an extension of her assault on conventional understandings of Jewish communal behaviour during the apartheid era, Braude relies on durable and well-rehearsed themes. The result is the recycling and reinforcement of conventional historical claims that are in fact in themselves worth re-examining. Although Braude’s historical analysis breaks little new ground, she intelligently places Jewish writers into South African history, arguing that as a group they were responsive to a common set of fears and concerns. Braude traces the impact of these concerns on their writing, finding commonalities across ideology and time. The anthology’s strength is the novelty of its literary analysis and argument. The anthology is intended to uncovera ‘hidden South African Jewish history’ (p. xii), one in which troubling but politically compromising memories were suppressed after the National Party electoral victory in 1948. Braude seeks to ‘restore memory’ (p. xi) ofJewish anxiety about racial status, about the National Party (NP) ties with National Socialism, and the painful ‘living sores’ (p. Ixii) of the Holocaust. Braude argues that before and after 1948 South African Jews were considered to be racial outsiders, perceived and perceiving themselves not to be fully white. This feeling of racial ambiguity produced fears of potential exclusion and anti-Semitism, concerns that were magnified by the pro-Nazism of the NP in the 1930s and the trauma of the Holocaust. Braude contends that these fears endured, pushing the community to demonstrate ‘Jewish whiteness and loyalty to white concerns in order to secure a place of belonging for Jews under the apartheid government’ (p. x). The Jewish community conformed to white society’s racial norms to maintain invisibility, silencing its anxieties and glossing over memories of its previously troubled relationship with the NP with an amnesic and appeasing alternative. Those Jews who were involved in the struggle against apartheid also constructed a wall of silence around their anxieties about exclusion and anti-Semitism. While the community in general sought acceptance through conformity with the current regime, Jews involved in radical leftwing politics sought to ensure acceptance in a future egalitarian society. Participation in the struggle offered for some, an escape from atroubling Jewish identity and its attendant fears, an ethnic invisibility attainable through suppression of their Jewishness. Although on the surface communal memory had been scoured of its disquieting and politically inappropriate elements, the ‘invisible’ yet ‘enduring’ (p. xii) fears lingered beneath. Jewish writers subconsciously projected these anxieties into their fiction writing. Braude argues that Sarah Gertrude Millin’s concern with the exclusion of Jews from the white group was ‘displaced’ onto her coloured protagonists. Millin resorted to ‘adopting’ and ‘mimicking’ (p. xxvi) white racist attitudes in her fiction to demonstrate her loyalty to and belonging in white society. Racism acted as a ‘smoke screen to deflect attention from her own dubious racial status’ (p. xxvi-xxvii). Her public defence ofapartheid was similarly