Speak the Truth, Laughing

The characters in these eleven stories range from a political activist, in the apartheid years, released from a South African jail into a seemingly uncaring world, to a child of immigrant parents living between two cultures; from the daughter of a tribal chief who returns from the city to her arid homeland in the heart of Africa, to the tragic love of a Rabbi and his wife in an East European shelter; from a dingo pursued to its inevitable end by the people of a small Australian town, to a South African farmer who allows his land to revert to its natural state. In her struggle to arrive at the truth of a situation, Rose Zwi’s stories are leavened with humour and humanity. In the story which gives the name to this collection ‘To Speak the Truth, Laughing’, a politically inexperienced white woman joins an illegal march into a black township to protest against the arrest of black schoolchildren who have rebelled against the system. In another story, ‘Conquest of America’, a writer arrives in New York in search of a literary agent. Her present agent has axed her. You must know lots of people in New York, he says as he bundles her into a taxi with her dog-eared manuscripts.
Not a soul, she replies. Lovely, he says in a distracted manner. Let’s have coffee sometime. International award-winning author Rose Zwi has penned a joyous collection of stories bringing together Australian and South African lives.