IN THE MAIL: Peter Godwin, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun” (Little, Brown & Co., April 17, 2007), with this book description:
After his father’s heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to
Zimbabwe , the land of his birth, from, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Manhattan ‘s dramatic spiral downwards into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. Zimbabwe
And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years. Then Godwin discovered a shocking family secret that helped explain their loyalty. Africa was his father’s sanctuary from another identity, another world.
He has discovered that his father’s real name is not George Godwin, and his father’s identity — “this Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert books, with his clipped British accent” — is an invention. His real name is Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb:
And then I begin to wonder what this means for my own identity. I’m already muddled enough trying to work out where I fit in — between Africa, England, and now America, where I’ve been living for four years. Everyone in my own home — Joanna, our son, Thomas, me — speaks with a different accent; it’s a
of dialects. What am I supposed to do now? Garnish myself with a dash of ethnic condiment, instant Jewry? Cast off eight years of Jesuit education and convert? I vaguely recall that Judaism is passed down through the female line, so I probably can’t achieve genuine Jewhood anyway. I think of that Jonathan Miller (himself a Jew) quip, “I’m not a Jew, I’m only Jewish.” Babel