It’s the birthday of author Dan Jacobson, who The Guardian said “should rank as one of the leading novelists of his time” (John Sutherland, “Dan Jacobson obituary,” June 16, 2014).  Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1929, Jacobson’s novels and stories explored racism in apartheid-era South Africa and, later, his own complicated relationship with Judaism and the bible.

Jacobson’s father and mother were Jewish immigrants who had fled, respectively, Latvia and Lithuania and raised their family in Kimberly, South Africa. He studied English at the University of Witwatersrand, lived briefly in an Israeli kibbutz, then moved to London for a year where he taught at a Jewish boys school and began to write. Jacobson lost his teaching job when he let slip to his young charges that the universe is millions of years old (wait—this is how I find out?) and returned to South Africa to pursue boring desk jobs. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a boring desk job.) He married a teacher from Zimbabwe in 1954 and they moved to London, where he eventually lectured at the University of London, becoming a professor of English in 1988. He lived there most of his adult life, with teaching stints at places like Syracuse University in New York, SUNY Buffalo in New York, and Australian National University.

Jacobson was already gaining a strong reputation as a writer at this point, publishing work in places like The New Yorker, and his first novel, The Trap, appeared in 1955, followed by A Dance in the Sun in 1956, both set in South Africa. He went to Stanford for a year as writer in residence and wrote The Price of Diamonds (1958), a comedy-mystery with more serious themes belong the surface. (His hometown, Kimberly, had been a big diamond mining center but was in decline in his childhood.) His fourth novel, The Evidence of Love (1960), was about a light-skinned black man and white woman who are imprisoned for getting married. He then wrote his longest work, The Beginnings (1966), about a Lithuanian Jewish family who immigrates to South Africa. Jacobson carried with him the knowledge that had his grandfather in Lithuania not died young of a heart attack, his mother’s family would not have left for South Africa and would have been wiped out in the near-total Nazi extermination of Lithuanian Jews.

He left behind his South African writing and went on to write biblical novels (e.g., The Rape of Tamar, 1970), a nonfiction study of the bible (The Story of Stories: The Chosen People and its God, 1982), and Time and Again: Autobiographies (1985), a collection of essays. (This last sounds fascinating; Jacobson describes events that shaped his life, including an episode of bullying he endured in childhood that marked him for life.) Jacobson wrote much else besides, even some experimental work à la Kafka. His writing was marked by hard-won compassion and was critically acclaimed, but varied enough in focus throughout his career that he may not have collected the following he deserved. Jacobson died in London in 2014, survived by his wife, three children, and several grandchildren.

Fun fact: Jacobson was an affable, even jovial colleague but could strike terror in the hearts of anyone who asked him to edit their work.

Be safe on this cold snowy Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.