Bonert’s Lion Seeker up for Governor General Award

The Lion Seeker

Kenneth Bonert

Random House Canada

 

The Governor General’s Literary Awards will be announced on Nov. 13 and among the candidates in the English-language fiction category is The Lion Seeker, a debut novel from 41-year-old Toronto novelist Kenneth Bonert about a young Jewish man who immigrates from Lithuania to South Africa before the Second World War.

Bonert was born in South Africa and raised in Johannesburg; he came to Toronto with his parents in 1989. The author of several previously published short stories and a novella, he has said that much in his first novel originated with the stories his Yiddish-speaking grandmother used to tell him about her childhood in Lithuania.

 The Lion Seeker is set in the tough streets of Doornfontein, a section of Johannesburg. It tells the coming-of-age story of Isaac Helger, the son of Jewish immigrants. From his mother Isaac attains an overpowering sense of his mission:  to obtain a “house of our own” for the family and to remember always the family members left behind in their ancestral village of Dusat, Lithuania.

But terrible unspoken family secrets from the past haunt him and he faces a stark moral choice as war clouds darken the horizon and threaten the Jews of Europe.

 Bonert’s prose rings with a robust and raw energy; it seems he has invented a rich and colourful language all his own, with many Yiddish streaks. The Lion Seekers has been compared with J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace for its ability to render the South African experience universal.

Still, it faces stiff competition in the awards: Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth and Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts. No matter which book wins, one thing is clear: Bonert has made a remarkable literary debut and seems likely to reach a great many readers.

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The Newcomers

Lily Poritz Miller

Sumach/ Three O’clock Press

 

Very few novels have been written about the Jewish experience in South Africa – and yet, astonishingly, only four years ago another Canadian novelist produced a novel that delved into the same setting and milieu and featured South African Jewish characters originally from Lithuania.

Toronto-based writer Poritz Miller’s debut novel In A Pale Blue Light, focuses on Libka Hoffman, a Cape Town-born daughter of Lithuanian immigrants who finds herself, in the 1940s, at odds with South African society. Libka cannot accept South Africa’s racial laws and her innocent friendships mark her as a social outcast.

Poritz Miller has  followed up with a second novel, The Newcomers. The book again focuses on Libka after she and her family relocate to a small American town in New England. The family saga now treads into the postwar era, after the devastation of their loved ones back in Lithuania.

Although not nearly as daring stylistically as Bonert, Poritz Miller creates realistic and memorable characters, and weaves a gripping tale that ultimately focuses on Libka’s romantic and life choices: will she settle for a dull, traditional life partner whom she doesn’t love or perhaps escape to some unknown future that seems impossible to envision?

Poritz Miller reads from The Newcomers at the Barbara Frum Library,  20 Covington Rd., Toronto on  Nov. 13, 7 to 8:15 p.m. She will also be interviewed by author Ayelet Tsabari at a book launch at Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay St., Nov. 28, 6 to 8 p.m.

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I Kept My Promise

Gerda Frieberg

Malcolm Lester

 

 Toronto Holocaust survivor Gerda Frieberg has written this memoir about her experiences as a Jewish child in a small town in Upper Silesia in the prewar years, then as a concentration camp inmate “behind barbed wire, forgotten by an indifferent world” for three years.

In 1940, Gerda escaped from the Jaworzno ghetto and travelled through Germany on a dangerous mission back to her hometown to retrieve an essential document for her father. Removing the Jewish star from her clothes, she donned a German pin and boarded a train. “With the pin on my lapel, and speaking fluent German, I carried on a conversation with [some German] soldiers, pretending I was one of them,” she writes.

Although she attained the document and made it back to the camp, ultimately it didn’t help because her father was eventually sent away to his death. “Take care of Mother till I return,” were his last words to her.

Gerda spent the remainder of the war in Sosnowiec. She knew it was nearly over when an SS commander who had long tormented her suddenly became kind: he brought her some extra soup and asked her to remember that he had helped her.

 The night before the Nazi commandants vacated, they told the inmates their barracks would be dynamited while they slept. Instead, the next day they were liberated.

This “legacy book” provides a succinct account of the author’s story, beautifully illustrated with many photographs and documents.