The epigraph to Kenneth Bonert's bold, ambitious debut novel, The Lion Seeker, comes from an 1884 report from Lithuania published in HaMelitz, a Hebrew journal. It describes a traveler going to South Africa "from our land, tired and weary of the oppressor." In Africa "he breathes a new life, a life of freedom and liberty, a life of wealth and honour." Here there is "no discrimination between a Hebrew and a Christian.... Every man can attend to his labours diligently and find a just reward for his toil." Perhaps.
The Lion Seeker deals with a mass exodus that few have heard about: in the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of Jewish Lithuanians emigrated to South Africa in the hope of finding a new life. In Bonert's novel Abel Helger, a Lithuanian Jew from a shtetl in Dusat, arrived in the 1920s. The young man with a scuffling foot set up a modest watchmaking shop in Doornfontein, Afrikaans for "fountain of thorns." Later, his wife, the oddly veiled Gitelle, and their two children, Isaac and his sister, Rively, follow. On the day they left, Rively was quiet, Isaac was squirming. This bright five-year old, red-haired boy "hadn't stopped jerking and kicking from the second he came out of her."
In Cape Town Gitelle saw "human beings burned the color of coal or dark-brewed tea or cured leather." Johannesburg was two hot dry days north, pierced by that "red sun, a madman's glowering eyeball." They arrive at a self-made Jewish ghetto in the "baking dust of the deepest south." Abel has a shiksa girl to help with cleaning, cooking. "Is that what she calls it," Gitelle says; she fires her that afternoon and sets to work.
Isaac is our "hero" in this bildungsroman, but his mother, Gitelle, with the "dense power of her unmoveable being," is the most intriguing, the most mysterious. Behind her veil she is scarred, literally and figuratively--something happened in her past that she never talks about. Later, she saves enough money to have a procedure that gives her "half a mouth, half a scar." Burning her veil in the yard, she smiles at last.
One day she wields an axe on the couch that Abel's lazy, do-nothing friends always sit on, destroys it, chases them away. All the insults she has endured rip out of her in a fury; she calls them nochshleppers, kleps, kuylikers. Befitting a novel about many cultures, Bonert draws upon languages, words, phrases to help create his characters and their cultures, going back and forth from one to another: catty, moochoo, biltong, churuman, bladderfool, reinforcing his representation of the social complexity of individual worlds.
Isaac is Gitelle's Clever, "my boy, my beautiful," not a Stupid. She tells him he can't play with his friend Skots: "A Coloured is half of a Black. It's coffee in your blood. We are Whites. We are Jews but we are Whites here." People will try to stop you, but "you go forward and make and do." One day, Isaac brings home a puppy he took away from the Puppyman, who was going to kill it for food. Gitelle is furious: Where will they get the money for food, who will take care of it, this dirty animal makes diseases. "Nu, zog mir," she says. "Zog mir der richtike emes." So, tell me. Tell me the real truth. Isaac knows his mother is right--the dog has to go. "Today he's done like a Stupid." Isaac does her bidding, and continues to do so, with an unrelenting desire to please her, bring her family here, build her a house they can all live in together.
He goes to high school, which he hates. He lusts after a female teacher; one day at school he's caught masturbating with her nearby; he's expelled. Abel is mad; Gitelle says Isaac can work, earn money. Like Bellow's Augie March, Isaac ventures forth and begins his adventures in this complex world.
Always the entrepreneur, as a young boy he sold cold soda to drivers, but the lack of a license ended that. He takes a job supervising Black movers but another money-making plan he concocts backfires. He learns how to repair cars and partners with a schemer to sell scrap metal. Then he meets and falls in love with an upper-class English girl, always striving for more. The Second World War looms and Gitelle fears for her family in Lithuania, while Isaac is fearful of Nazi sympathizers in their midst.
The Lion Seeker is a powerful tale, beautifully told. Bonert's prose demonstrates sureness and confidence. At more than 500 pages, it's a long tale, and compelling. Mingling comedy and sadness, Bonert creates a huge world filled with many memorable characters. Like other great Jewish immigration epics, this novel has plot twists, surprises and unexpected revelations. He also posits a brooding mystery that hides in the dark. When you live for a while with Isaac--his family and his friends, in his South African world--you will come to appreciate Bonert's accomplishment, how he has been able to bring us along, entertain us, and move us in an authentic way that only a skilled writer can. --Tom Lavoie