Morris Hoffman

Born in Latvia, the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Morris Hoffman settled in South Africa in 1906. He spent most of his life earning a living as a shopkeeper in the arid, sparsely populated Little Karoo, an intermontane plateau basin in the Western Cape. He published prose and poetry in South African Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals. His fiction takes a realistic, unsentimental view of Jewish life in the Little Karoo. It portrays the burdens of living as a Jew in rural districts where Afrikaners, who became increasingly anti-Jewish during the 1930s and 1940s, were the majority white population.