A white African experience of identity, survival and Holocaust memory

A white African experience of identity, survival and Holocaust memory

This article provides an alternative reading of Peter Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which has predominantly been interpreted either within the genre of white African memoir, or alternatively as a condemnation of Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe. I argue that it could also be critically interpreted in a different context, within the field of scholarship of assimilation to a non-Jewish identity as a family's survival strategy, and of the transmission of Holocaust experience to later generations. This memoir reveals the experience of one man's search for his family's past, as well as the transition from Polish Jewish identity to British Rhodesian settler identity in southern Africa. In becoming aware of his father's Jewish past, the author becomes aware that this is also now his own history.

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