Also, many immigrants had left family and friends in the shtetls , Jewish villages. Small, unelaborated details indicate the way the war destroyed these ties and ruptured historical continuity. Zwi ceased asking about her father's post-war correspondence with Leah, Leib's wife. Decades later, seeking the knowledge suggested by those letters, she travels to Lithuania to meet Leah and her daughter Frieda. Zwi was not alone in cultivating silence to ward off trauma.
Similar silence characterises much South African Jewish literature.
It is born from the pain produced by the knowledge of what had happened to family and friends in Europe. As elsewhere, overcoming the silence of trauma takes time, even decades. There are, however, specifically South African reasons for the current shift in South African Jewish consciousness indicated by Last Walk in Naryshkin Park . Its replacement of silence with memory occurs at the point of South African democratisation, when fear evoked by Afrikaans nationalist rule ceases to hold sway. This convergence is significant.