Brief Hours and Weeks is the author's account of growing up in a small, tightly knit, first-generation Polish-Jewish community in Cape Town in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

Observing through at first naive and then later more sophisticated eyes, he describes his childhood and youth in a protective off-the-boat immigrant Jewish family in very British-Commonwealth South Africa as apartheid becomes increasingly coercive.

Through vivid and candid personal stories, he brings to life a time, place, culture, people, and set of mores that no longer exist. At 21, he leaves Africa to study in America.