Rainbow Nation reality check

This book tells the true story of two elderly Jewish brothers-in-law who run a furniture business in Johannesburg. Since 1994 their lives have been a turmoil of theft, betrayal and family strife as the new South Africa helps itself to their stock.

David Cohen clearly intends the book to have some extra resonance on the tenth anniversary of the end of apartheid. He succeeds triumphantly in this aim.

The Jewish immigrant background of the two partners - their families arrived 80 or 90 years ago from eastern Europe and Palestine respectively - provides an unmistakable and ironic motif: look, here are two people whose families came to Africa, built up a business and a family life from nothing, and are now being robbed blind by the newly emerging classes.

Nadine Gordimer - herself the daughter of immigrants - once described this orgy of violence, robbery and rape to me as "the revenge of the repressed".

Cohen sees that many Africans do feel a sort of entitlement, particularly when they can't help noticing that the white people still seem to have the large houses, the swimming pools and the cars.

But the story carries a few surprises, because it turns out that it is not only the dispossessed who are stealing from Rubin and Sher, but also their own family, their trusted employees and even the security company paid to protect their cash takings.

When a younger brother is caught with his hands in the till, the rabbi is called in and we find ourselves in a Johannesburg version of Hyman Kaplan.

The brothers-in-law apply the same qualities of Jewish exasperation and good humour to family problems as they do to the changing nature of downtown Johannesburg, always contriving in the end to be optimistic.

They are almost the last white traders in Jules Street, in the old working-class south of the city, once the home of white miners, then Portuguese immigrants, and finally Africans, free from restrictions, but jobless and desperate.

They sell furniture, televisions and fridges on credit, with the inevitable result that a large part of their energies is devoted to recovering debts in Soweto.