ABRAHAMS, Lionel (Isaac) 1928-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 11, 1928, in Johannesburg, South Africa; died May 31 (one source says May 30), 2004, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Publisher, editor, and author. Abrahams was a respected South African poet and novelist who founded the literary magazine Purple Renoster. Born with a form of cerebral palsy known as Jewish torsion dystonia, he was confined in a wheelchair until he was eleven, when a Christian faith healer compelled him to rise to his feet. For the next fifty-five years, he was able to walk on his own before the illness sent him back to the wheelchair. But it was for his writing, not his disability and amazing healing, that Abrahams was known. Privately educated by the author Herman Charles Bosman, whom his parents hired while their son was a student at Damelin College High School, Abrahams also attended the University of the Witwatersrand in the early 1950s. Literature became his main love, and in the 1950s he found work teaching writing workshops. Later, in 1957, he founded Purple Renoster, a literary magazine that published works by such authors as Mongane Wally Serote and Oswald Mtshali. As editor of the magazine, Abrahams walked a difficult line between publishing stories and poems that offered valuable insight into the apartheid system in South Africa while not going so far as to get himself arrested in the process. He served as editor and publisher of the magazine until 1972, but by this time he was already publishing his own writings, as well as running Renoster Books. After coediting South African Writing Today with Nadine Gordimer in 1966, and contributing to a poetry collection, he released his first novel, The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan (1975), which was followed much later by The White Life of Felix Greenspan (2002). Abrahams was best known for his poetry, however, which was collected in such volumes as Journal of a New Man (1984), The Writer in Sand (1988), and A Dead Tree Full of Live Birds (1995). In addition to this, Abrahams also was a cofounder of Bateleur Press, and was publisher of two other magazines: Bloody Horse from 1979 to 1981 and Sesame from 1981 to 1992.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Independent (London, England), June 9, 2004, p. 34.

ONLINE

iafrica.com,http://www.iafrica.com/ (June 1, 2004).

South Africa—Poetry International Web,http://southafrica.poetryinternational.org/ (July 21, 2004).