Brief Hours and Weeks - by Emanuel Derman (Hardcover)

About the Book

A memoir of a Jewish immigrant-family youth in apartheid-era Cape Town in the 1950s and 60s.

Book Synopsis

Brief Hours and Weeks is the author's account of growing up in a small, tightly knit, first-generation Polish-Jewish community in Cape Town in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

Observing through at first naive and then later more sophisticated eyes, he describes his childhood and youth in a protective off-the-boat immigrant Jewish family in very British-Commonwealth South Africa as apartheid becomes increasingly coercive.

Through vivid and candid personal stories, he brings to life a time, place, culture, people, and set of mores that no longer exist. At 21, he leaves Africa to study in America.

Review Quotes

"Brief Hours and Weeks awakes many memories of Cape Town, the city of Emanuel Derman's youth and mine, as it was half a century ago. The chapter on the lonely Mrs Gold is a triumph." - J M Coetzee, Nobel Laureate

Why did they invent reading? "Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian" would almost be reason enough. It's the story of a Jewish boy's coming-of-age in the South Africa of the 1950s and '60s. Emanuel Derman is the remarkable author and subject: a Bell Labs-caliber physicist turned Wall Street quant turned professor of financial engineering turned autobiographer. One charm of this gorgeously illustrated book is the absence of a clear delineation between what happened and what Mr. Derman allows himself to imagine happened. "The author likes the observation by Sheila Heti," an endnote reveals: " The self's report on itself is surely a great fiction.' " So we don't really know whether the pimply young Emanuel bedded the lonely Mrs. Gold, though we can be quite certain that somehow, somewhere, the student of electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics learned how to write like an angel.

-Wall Street Journal, James Grant, author of Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

"Written with laconic candour, this book is proof of why you had to leave this city that corralled you while it nurtured you." - Albie Sachs, writer and anti-apartheid activist

"This is a touching, evocative (and beautifully illustrated) memoir, a vibrant portrayal of a vanished yet not wholly distant world. Emanuel Derman paints a convincing picture with great skill, candour and humanity. These are precious memories, which you will enjoy reading."

-Stefan Stern,

former Financial Times columnist and author

"Professor Derman writes with such honesty, openness and detail that I feel I may have developed false memories. 'But, Paul, you aren't Jewish and you've never been to Cape Town.' Now I'm not so sure."

-Paul Wilmott, mathematician, author and semi-professional controversialist