Overview

Full Product Details

9781966981046

Table of Contents

Reviews

Compelling from its first sentence to its last, Somewhere I Belong tells the story of a young woman's hard-won coming-of-age in the waning days of apartheid South Africa and beyond. From her Eastern-European Jewish ancestors' arrival in rural South Africa to her parents' fierce efforts to assimilate and prosper, Berelowitz traces a complex familial and cultural history, creating a vivid tapestry of a volatile time. It's thrilling-and sometimes harrowing-to watch this brilliant and passionate young woman make her way through a treacherous era full of false promises and subtle traps and somehow prevail. The author would ultimately become an art historian and university professor, and her keen eye for the concealed detail, the disputed date, the way ""small flashes of illumination"" [cast] light onto shadow"" make for wonderful reading. Lyrical and full of suspense, this memoir is a gem of observation, imagination, and courage. -Marjorie Sandor, author of The Secret Music at Tordesillas As an art historian reading the work of a fellow scholar, I was enchanted by Jo-Anne Berelowitz' beautifully crafted autofiction of her life, first in apartheid-era South Africa and later as an immigrant in California. With the sophistication of Jane Austen in revealing character and mores through description of lived spaces, Berelowitz' gripping narrative is enriched by analyses of personally meaningful artworks and collections. This wonderful book will particularly resonate with anyone who has explored their own identity and heritage. -Allyson Burgess Williams, Ph.D. Author of ""Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia: Propriety, Magnificence, and Piety in Portraits of a Renaissance Duchess."" In Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy. Probing, richly layered, and beautifully written, Somewhere I Belong is a masterful blend of the remembered and the imagined. The author's personal story, mostly set in apartheid South Africa, is gripping. ""Don't think of this place as home,"" Berelowitz's father tells his ten-year-old daughter, who has never lived anywhere else. Thus begins a lifelong quest for belonging which, while the author's own, poses questions pertinent to us all. -Nancy Geyer, Pushcart prize-winning essayist, recipient of the 2025 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction With eloquent intimacy, this memoir artfully navigates childhood, university life, marriage, and emigration from apartheid South Africa. The journey continues in California with motherhood and marital dissolution, but with subsequent academic achievement, triumphant self-assertion, and love. Dislocations and crises may delay the author's sense of belonging, but her book belongs in your hands and on your bookshelf. -David Reifler, Days of Ticho: Empire, Mandate, Medicine and Art in the Holy Land Joanne Berelowitz is a master of lyric prose. In Somewhere I Belong, she weaves personal accounts, historical facts, and acquired insights into a moving and memorable story. Demonstrating keen intellectual and emotional curiosity, coupled with steadfast determination as a lifelong learner, she engages the reader in her exploration of Jewish heritage, the apartheid South African culture in which she was reared, and, ultimately, in finding the place where she belongs. -Lori Kline, author of Almost a Minyan and Josiah's Dreams

Author Information

Jo-Anne Berelowitz earned her MA in Art History from Stanford University, her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles, and her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She was, for many years, senior art historian at San Diego State University. Her art history essays have appeared in Genders, Society and Space, The Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, The Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature, and elsewhere. In 2018 she was awarded the Wabash Prize for Literary Nonfiction. She resides in Austin, TX.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available