Searching for Sarah – The Woman Who Loved Langenhoven by Dominique Malherbe

This is the story about Dominique Malherbe’s quest to unveil the mysterious woman behind the father of the Afrikaans language, one Cornelis Jacobus Langenhoven.

C.J. Langenhoven was a writer and a poet who devoted his life to the establishment of Afrikaans as an official language. Indeed, his poetry, it could be argued, was what put Afrikaans on the proverbial map. He is also the author of the apartheid era’s national anthem, Die Stem van Suid-Afrika, some of which can still be heard in today’s Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika rendition.

But who was Sarah Goldblatt and what role did she play in Langenhoven’s life and legacy? That is the question Dominique Malherbe set about tackling when she embarked on her search for Sarah, the woman who fell in love with Langenhoven when she took a job as his assistant at the Oudtshoorn local newspaper, Het Suid-Westen, in 1913.

Malherbe admits that her impulse of researching and telling Sarah’s story now was perhaps unconsciously driven by the increasing surge of women’s stories being told as the #MeToo movement continues to gain momentum worldwide. Many significant female contributions – in every field – are being uncovered, evidence that reveals how women had helped to shape the world despite being marginalised by a seemingly invincible and impenetrable patriarchal system.

Reading Searching for Sarah – The Woman Who Loved Langenhoven (published by Tafelberg in May this year and also available in Afrikaans as Opsoek na Saartjie – Langenhoven se Geheime Liefde), it becomes clear that both Sarah and her contribution to the Afrikaans language and Langenhoven’s literary legacy were similarly marginalised by patronising biographers and the notoriously patriarchal Afrikaans society. Was it because she was a Jewess who learned to speak and write Afrikaans better than most Afrikaners, or was it because she was a woman, and by all accounts a fairly headstrong and ‘difficult’ one at that? Perhaps a bit of both?

When Langenhoven died suddenly on 15 July 1932 at the age of 58 and named a young Jewish woman, the fiery redhead Sarah Eva Goldblatt, executrix of his literary legacy, eyebrows were indignantly raised throughout the Afrikaner establishment. It would seem Langenhoven made the right call, though, as by the time Sarah died in 1975, she had made sure that more than two million copies of Langenhoven’s books had been sold – still one of South Africa’s greatest literary successes to date.

The subject of the book happens to be Malherbe’s great aunt, and the author has been fascinated by Sarah’s enigmatic life story from early childhood. Although she only met her aunt once, Malherbe had heard many tales from her mother, the daughter of Sarah’s brother Israel, about this eccentric aunt who devoted her life to teaching Afrikaans and to keeping the memory of Langenhoven and his literary work alive. In the Goldblatt family, the love relationship between Sarah and Langenhoven that lasted for twenty years, is an open secret and so is the fact that there was a child born from this romance.

When one considers the various online biographies of Langenhoven, it soon becomes clear why Malherbe felt compelled to set out in search of Sarah. Her name is mentioned not once in write-ups about Langenhoven. Neither is her tireless support of him for 20 years in his quest for Afrikaans. Nor her further 40 years of dedication after his death to the republishing of his Collected Works, or her work around the centenary celebrations of Langenhoven in 1973.

She is paid no recognition for her behind-the-scenes work in helping Langenhoven establish Afrikaans in parliament and finally getting it recognised, in 1927, as an official language of South Africa.

There is also precious little to be found of their relationship, professional or otherwise. Nevertheless, as Malherbe would prove, the pair irrefutably shared an exceptionally close bond. From their early years working together for a small newspaper in Oudtshoorn, Sarah became Langenhoven’s confidant and his adored sub editor. Indeed, the common refrain became: ‘Langenhoven doesn’t come without Sarah.’ Malherbe’s research also reveals that whenever the pair were not together, they wrote each other daily letters.

Malherbe succeeds in whisking the reader along on the rollercoaster ride that is her research – the scope of which was simply colossal and entailed tireless wading through reams and reams of archived documents, countless visits to libraries where handwritten letters had to be deciphered, and endless scouring of biographies, diaries, memoirs and journals. She also travelled far and wide and conducted interviews with friends and family members of both Langenhoven and her own, as well as other historical researchers – all in her quest to find out who Sarah really was, what the nature of the relationship was, and whether the romance produced a child.

Among her many sources was the biography of Langenhoven by JC Kannemeyer, Langenhoven, ‘n lewe, published in 1995. In his somewhat skewed iteration Kannemeyer projects Malherbe’s great aunt merely as ‘the Jew who hero-worshipped Langenhoven’.

Fortunately, Malherbe also had access to many of her aunt’s dearest friends, including writers such as Maria Elizabeth Rothmann (M.E.R) who, in her autobiography My beskeie deel: ‘n outobiografiese vertelling, mentions Sarah and their friendship often and refers to Langenhoven’s dependence on Sarah. Audrey Blignaut was another writer whose many journals afforded Malherbe valuable insight into the kind of person and friend that Sarah was. At the time of Sarah’s cremation, Blignaut lamented in her diary the fact that Sarah had never received an honorary doctorate despite her enormous contribution and dedication to the Afrikaans language.

But it was from the memoirs of and interviews with writer Elsa Joubert (who died aged 97 on June 14, 2020 from Covid-19 related complications) that Malherbe gleaned the most information regarding her aunt’s private thoughts and feelings. Joubert spent hours at Sarah’s deathbed, holding her hand and listening to her express her innermost sentiments.

If you take as much pleasure as I do from a thoroughly researched work, no matter the genre, you are bound to enjoy this book. Following the links and leads offered in the footnotes will keep you fascinated with the life and tribulations of Sarah Goldblatt long after you’ve finished reading the book. In fact, nerd that I am, in the end I enjoyed reading through Malherbe’s footnotes almost as much as reading the story.