Matthew Krouse’s ‘mid-career retrospective of a no career’
1 May 2021
Matthew Krouse on the set of The Soldier, a film about militarism and male rape. (Courtesy of Matthew Krouse)
Earlier this year, Adam Broomberg, a Johannesburg-born artist living in Berlin, phoned Matthew Krouse, a former actor turned writer and editor, with a request. It didn’t involve Yiddish translation work.
“People seem to think I am Isaac Bashevis Singer, which I’m not,” says Krouse, who was born into a Jewish family from Germiston in 1961. He grew up speaking Yiddish with his mother and has previously helped Broomberg with translations. “I won’t ever win a Nobel prize for writing in Yiddish,” he insists in reference to the Polish-American writer’s 1978 accolade.