Gordimer was born near Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. She was the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant watchmaker from Žagarė in Lithuania (then occupied by the Russian Empire),[2][3] and Hannah "Nan" (née Myers) Gordimer, who was from London.[4][5] Her mother was from an assimilated family of Jewish origins; Gordimer was raised in a secular household.[2][6]
Family background
Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents. Her father's experience as a refugee from Tsarist Russia helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid.[7] Conversely, Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa led her to found a crèche for black children.[5] Gordimer also witnessed government repression first-hand as a teenager; the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.[5]
Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because her mother, for "strange reasons of her own", did not put her into school (apparently, she feared that Gordimer had a weak heart).[7] Home-bound and often isolated, she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of 13.[8] Her first published work was a short story for children, "The Quest for Seen Gold", which appeared in the Children's Sunday Express in 1937; "Come Again Tomorrow", another children's story, appeared in Forum around the same time. At the age of 16, she had her first adult fiction published.[9]
