The Rowing Lesson

Pregnant with her first child, Betsy Klein is summoned from her home in New York to her father’s hospital bed in Cape Town. Once caregiver and physician to a whole community, her father is now slowly slipping to the other side.

As Betsy sits and waits for him to stir from his coma, she is compelled to imagine what his life had been like as a young Jewish man, surrounded by farmers on the South African platteland, only a decade since the Second World War.

The Rowing Lesson is an utterly convincing and vivid portrait of one man’s life, and also that of a daughter, recapturing the dreams and longings of a father and husband.