The International Writers Magazine - Our Tenth Year: Young Adult Review

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The Red Dress by Gaby Halberstam Macmillan Childrens ISBN 978-0-330-45053-9 (Feb 6th 2009) • Sam North It’s 1944 – Jo’Burg, South Africa and Rifke Lubetkin (14), daughter of a Lithuanian Jewish refugee is growing up under the rigid control of her stern traditional mother. They ire poor, there is a war on, although this is hardly mentioned and there is no father in the home, whereabouts unknown.

Rifke is anticipating the annual holiday to Kimberley to see her sister Mirele who lives with her Aunt Leah and Uncle Ber. She is excited to be on the steam train and always being embarrassed by her mother who has little English.
The trip to the family doesn’t go well. Her taller sister is already interested in boys and even though they are twins she is not allowed to join them for tennis, as they are the goyim – not Jews. Rifke is mortified, but things immediately get worse. Her Aunt buys her a pretty dress red dress, her first that isn’t a hand me down and when her mother sees it she tears it to shreds out of jealousy and makes them go straight back to Jo’Burg.
Her Mother knows how to ruin everything.

Back in the city she is sent to buy a chicken – fresh killed kosher style and at the shop she is invited to a party. Naturally her mother refuses to let her go and that’s it. Something in Rifke snaps and she runs away, steals on a Kimberley train to go back to her Aunt and sister.

On the train –hiding from the guard, she finds herself in the troop section and gets scared. She runs for the safety of the box car and the next thing she knows it is morning and the train has divided and she is hundreds of miles from Kimberly in the desert, the hot, scary desert where no one speaks English only Afrikaans.

Rifke ends up at the very poor farm of Mevrou van Neil – a woman alone with several kids to feed, a scary dog and Rifke is hardly welcome, plus she still has a stinking chicken with her.

The kids aren’t exactly hostile, but indifferent, life is hard, no one goes to school, and everyone has jobs to do. Mucking out the pigs, or goats, weeding, picking oranges, milking. There’s hardly any water; it’s tough and the desert unforgiving. Afrikaners were hardy people used to this life and these kids had never seen electricity, or films and there is no phone, no mail, nothing. For Rifke, used to the sophistication of Jo’Burg this is like travelling back in time.

Rifke discovers there is only one train a month going back and now she is trapped there. There is Anton (19) who seems to like her and his younger brother Willem too, who develops a crush on her. But what is the secret of the Zulu girl, Izula in the shed and the baby Sibu who takes a shine to Rifke. There are simmering tensions in the family and a month of hard labour ahead of Rifke before she can escape Driemieliesfontein and then there is curse of the Hammerhead to deal with.

A Red Dress is a life changing story for a young girl that is well told, rich in atmosphere and although for advanced readers would be a good challenge for any young reader keen to discover just how tough life was for kids in Africa over sixty years ago.

© Sam North Jan 22 2009
Author of Mean Tide

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