Burger's Daugther by Nadine Gordimer is a story about a young woman embracing a heritage with which she didn't identify or agree for the majority of her life. Rosa Burger is the daughter of two renowned activists for the South African Communist Party (SACP). When she's nine-years-old she's sent to live with some obscure distant relatives in order to protect her from the danger of her parents' work. She doesn't understand why she's being sent away and develops deep feelings of abandonment and resentment. She devotes her entire adult life to disassociating with her parents and her identity as their daughter, traveling to France and England. Eventually her past catches up with her and she begins accepting her somewhat prestigious socio-political position as Lionel Burger's daughter, until she runs into a man she grew up with who accuses her of being a fraud and a coward. This is the push she needs to face the dragon and embrace her rich heritage, continuing her parents' legacy in South Africa.
Rosa is a fascinating character because of her simultaneous embrace of logic and her frantic subconscious. Due no doubt to the severity and confusion of her childhood, she spends her young adult years bouncing around from one idea to the next. She lost her at age 14, so she's basically lacked a strong maternal figure for most of her life. When her died dies in prison when she's 26, Rosa immediately decides it was pointless. She rejects her parents' mission and chastises herself for ideologies and habits leftover from when she lived with them. Basically she's disgusted with herself for being inclined to support them because they considered their work more important than parenthood. She has extremely low self-esteem and abandonment issues, so she approaches each new situation as an outlet where she can hide her true identity. But it doesn't work. After years of running away, she finally surrenders to the mysterious force of legacy.
While this story is fictional, it is based upon real political events. Gordimer does a phenomenal job of working the emotion of the time and place into the plot. She treats each political idea as a relic of incredible importance, giving each idea a sort of reverence. According to Gordimer, she became interested in the white communists who were active in South Africa during Apartheid. She wrote the book in order to better understand those activists' position in the overall political scene of the day.
