Tales of Life, Love and Loss by Hillary Humbuger is a humorous, candid, well written, and simple to read book

Reviewer: Giyani Baloi
Title: Tales of Life Love and Loss: A memoir
Author: Hillary Humburger
Publisher: Jacana Media

“I arranged with a friend to give me the keys for her room for Denis to break my distractive hymen,” writers Hillary Humburger candidly in her memoir Tales of Life Love and Loss.

She started by giving the background of her grandparents and her parents, who were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. And how the persecution of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany on antisemitic bases drove her parents to seek sanctuary in South Africa in the early 1900s.

She talks about her childhood in Kensington, Johannesburg, her battle with understanding the logic of racism, discrimination against black people in South Africa, and how her peculiar nature put her at loggerheads with her parents who were inclined to go along with the apartheid system flow. She also talks about her childhood, schooling, dating, and her first kiss, her marriage to her first husband Denis, and her work, first as a teacher at an Indian school in Fordsburg.

There were only two things then. It’s either you went with the Apartheid flow or you disagreed with it and automatically fall on the revolutionary side of things. Hillary and Denis fell on the latter. Denis became a prominent lawyer of the activists then and, as a result, became friends with the likes of Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Denis Goldberg, Ronnie Kasrils, George Bizos and others. When Hillary and Denis went to live in England for about a year, they also became friends with the likes of William ‘Blonke’ Modisane, a South African writer and other activists who were based in the UK. They later decided to come back to South Africa to work and live permanently.

Much as Hillary and Denis were a happy couple, Denis, doing very well as a lawyer, spending a lot of time in court, sleeping late preparing for court cases, but a spark or chemistry was missing between them. As a result, Hillary could seek it somewhere else. She confesses courting Joe Slovo, who was married to Ruth First and a few others. She also mentions in her book that she once went to a room with the late South Africa’s top playwright, Barney Simon, took off her clothes, got into his bed and tried to stimulate him sensually after he had confessed to her about his sensual issues. She said, “Nothing worked,” and they left Simon’s room and walked together for a distance in silence without saying a word to each other about the unsuccessful encounter

Hillary had to later divorce her husband Denis after a marriage of 28 years and 3 sons. She later met and married Tony Humburger, a clinical psychologist and a businessman with whom she started Ebubele, a clinical psychology centre in Alexander township dedicated to childhood development. 

Tales of Life, Love and Loss is a humorous, candid, well written, and simple to read book.