Masquerade: The Story of My Life, by Rayda Jacobs
This autobiography starts with the author's childhood in Diep River, Cape Town, in 1947. After her divorce, Rayda’s mother moves back in with her strict parents. The family are forcibly removed to Athlone. Rayda grows up in a large, well-off religious Muslim household on the one hand and, on the other, in a household with Jewish roots and an unconventional grandfather. Rayda finds work as a white legal secretary in the Cape Town CBD until someone alerts the authorities. At the age of 21 she leaves with her young sister for Canada, where she spent the next 27 years. There she went through two marriages, the first to an Iranian with whom she had two children, the second to an Egyptian. Both marriages end in divorce. Her daughter's near fatal car crash is heartbreaking. In the early 1990s, the author returns to South Africa where she starts writing full-time and making documentary films, culminating in her directing and acting the lead role in Confessions of a Gambler, based on the novel by the same title which won her the Sunday Times Award. Often the source of controvecy in her Muslim community, at the age of 61 she was the special guest at the Dubai Film Festival in 2007. Throughout her life, beset with hardship, it is her writing and, later, her children that sustain her and help her to survive. One very inspiring woman!
