"Darker Shade of Pale traces early twentieth century Jewish migration from the Russian Empire to colonial South Africa through one man’s life. Blending personal memoir and historical inquiry, Deborah Posel reveals the hidden costs of uprooting—dislocation, ambition, shame—and the shame of failure in a settler colony. A personal journey through forgotten history, Darker Shade of Pale uncovers the hidden story of global migration at the turn of the twentieth century from the Jewish territories of the Russian Empire, called The Pale of Settlement, to the far-flung British colony of South Africa. Following the life of the author's grandfather – an ordinary man whose struggles and disappointments mirror those of countless others – this book challenges the common narrative of Jewish immigrant success in South Africa. This intimate account reveals a more complex reality and opens unfamiliar vistas. It reveals how Jewish preoccupations with status and success travelled from shtetl to colony, and the psychological costs incurred; the ironies of this journeying for literate, working women from the shtetl; the version of whiteness that South Africa assigned to Jews from Eastern Europe and the various ways in which Jews interacted with Black people; some of the unexpected economic routes they chose, as well as the prejudicial punches that Jewish immigrants had to take – from both the British and the already-assimilated English-speaking Jewish community in South Africa. Darker Shade of Pale brings the psychodramas of immigration into focus, in the traumas of dislocation along with the pressures to succeed and the shame of failure. Through one man's unfulfilled hopes, we discover what was given and what was taken as immigrants sought to build new lives in a strange land."