Darker Shade Of Pale

Part memoir, part global history, part historical sociology, part meditation on the ways in which inherited trauma shapes individual lives, Darker Shade of Pale is a poignant story about the life of Deborah Posel’s paternal grandfather. Like the majority of the Jewish immigrants who came to South Africa from the eastern European lands that made up the Pale of Settlement, he was not a remarkable man. His life was not particularly exceptional.

But, as Posel shows so brilliantly and with much empathy in this stunning book, he and the thousands like him also belong to the historical record. By giving sympathetic account of her grandfather’s otherwise unremarkable life, Posel not only challenges the myth of Jewish exceptionalism that is so key to the historiography of Jewish Studies in South Africa, she also debunks one of the basic pillars of anti-Semitism.

— Jacob Dlamini, Associate Professor, Department of History, Princeton University Darker Shade of Pale traces early twentieth century Jewish migration from the Russian Empire to colonial South Africa through one man’s life. Blending personal memoir and historical inquiry, Deborah Posel reveals the hidden costs of uprooting—dislocation, ambition, shame—and the shame of failure in a settler colony.
A sweeping story with intimate roots, Darker Shade of Pale traces a little-known chapter in the history of global migration: the journey of families at the turn of the twentieth century from the Jewish territories of the Russian Empire, called The Pale of Settlement, to the far-flung British colony of South Africa.

At the heart of this book by acclaimed South African sociologist, Deborah Posel, is the story of her grandfather, Maurice Posel. An ordinary man whose struggles and disappointments mirror those of countless others, this book challenges the common narrative of Jewish immigrant success in South Africa. Darker Shade of Pale brings into focus the traumas of dislocation along with the pressures to succeed and the shame of failure. Through one man’s unfulfilled hopes, we discover what was given and what was taken as immigrants sought to build new lives in a strange land.

From the shtetl’s rigid traditions to the racial hierarchies of the British Empire, Posel explores how migrants navigated social orders. She reveals how Jewish preoccupations with status and success travelled from shtetl to colony, and the psychological costs incurred; the ironies of this journeying for literate, working women from the shtetl; the version of whiteness that South Africa assigned to Jews from Eastern Europe and the various ways in which they interacted with Black people; the unexpected economic routes they chose as well as the prejudicial punches that Jewish immigrants had to take – from both the British and the already-assimilated English-speaking Jewish community in South Africa.

Lyrical, probing and unflinching, Darker Shade of Pale is a powerful reminder that the migrant’s story is never simple and always singular.