1960, Durban, South Africa: A Jewish father tells Jo-Anne, his ten-year-old daughter, “There’ll be a bloody revolution here: revenge, massacres, a blood bath. Don’t think of this place as home. We’ll have to leave and find home someplace else.” His words leave her feeling frightened, uprooted, and longing for a place to call home. She loves and trusts her father more than anyone in the world until the unimaginable happens: He betrays her. Jo-Anne represses the betrayal and moves on with her life and career. Years later, she discovers a letter her father had written long ago, confronting her with an agonizing truth she had refused to face and deepening her confusion about her identity. Seeking clarity, she reexamines her roots, a journey that leads her to explore her Jewish grandfathers who fled pogroms in Russia and Lithuania. How did their quests for home play out in her life? At last, she has an epiphany that leads her to find where she truly belongs.
Somewhere I Belong: A Story of Country, Family, Home, and Jewish is a compelling memoir with universal themes of love, betrayal, self-discovery, and finding home.
Jo-Anne Berelowitz is a writer and art historian whose work explores identity, family, cultural displacement, and longing for home. Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, she emigrated to California in 1977, earned her MA in Art History from Stanford University, her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles, and her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She was, for many years, senior art historian at San Diego State University. Her art history essays have appeared in Genders, Society and Space, The Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, The Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was awarded the Wabash Prize for Literary Nonfiction. She now resides in Austin, Texas. Her genre is auto-fiction.