A moving tale of betrayal, family, and belonging in the world 1960, Durban, South Africa: A Jewish father tells Jo-Anne, his ten-year-old daughter, "There'll be a bloody revolution here: revenge, massacres, a blood bath. Don't think of this place as home. We'll have to leave and find home someplace else." His words leave her feeling frightened, uprooted, and longing for a place to call home. She loves and trusts her father more than anyone in the world until the unimaginable happens: He betrays her. Jo-Anne represses the betrayal and moves on with her life and career. Years later, she discovers a letter her father had written long ago, confronting her with an agonizing truth she had refused to face and deepening her confusion about her identity. Seeking clarity, she reexamines her roots, a journey that leads her to explore her Jewish grandfathers who fled pogroms in Russia and Lithuania. How did their quests for home play out in her life? At last, she has an epiphany that leads her to find where she truly belongs. Somewhere I Belong is a compelling memoir with universal themes of love, betrayal, self-discovery, and finding home. "Compelling from its first sentence to its last, Somewhere I Belong tells the story of a young woman's hard-won coming-of-age in the waning days of apartheid South Africa and beyond. From her Eastern-European Jewish ancestors' arrival in rural South Africa to her parents' fierce efforts to assimilate and prosper, Berelowitz traces a complex familial and cultural history, creating a vivid tapestry of a volatile time." - Marjorie Sandor, author of The Secret Music at Tordesillas "As an art historian reading the work of a fellow scholar, I was enchanted by Jo-Anne Berelowitz' beautifully crafted autofiction of her life, first in apartheid-era South Africa and later as an immigrant in California. With the sophistication of Jane Austen in revealing character and mores through description of lived spaces, Berelowitz' gripping narrative is enriched by analyses of personally meaningful artworks and collections. This wonderful book will particularly resonate with anyone who has explored their own identity and heritage." - Allyson Burgess Williams, Ph.D., author of "Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia: Propriety, Magnificence, and Piety in Portraits of a Renaissance Duchess" in Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy. "Probing, richly layered, and beautifully written, Somewhere I Belong is a masterful blend of the remembered and the imagined. The author's personal story, mostly set in apartheid South Africa, is gripping." - Nancy Geyer, Pushcart prize-winning essayist, recipient of the 2025 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction "With eloquent intimacy, this memoir artfully navigates childhood, university life, marriage, and emigration from apartheid South Africa. The journey continues in California with motherhood and marital dissolution, but with subsequent academic achievement, triumphant self-assertion, and love." - David Reifler, Days of Ticho: Empire, Mandate, Medicine and Art in the Holy Land "Joanne Berelowitz is a master of lyric prose. In Somewhere I Belong, she weaves personal accounts, historical facts, and acquired insights into a moving and memorable story. Demonstrating keen intellectual and emotional curiosity, coupled with steadfast determination as a lifelong learner, she engages the reader in her exploration of Jewish heritage, the apartheid South African culture in which she was reared, and, ultimately, in finding the place where she belongs." - Lori Kline, author of Almost a Minyan and Josiah's Dreams