Kenneth Bonert
In the tradition of the great immigrant sagas, ,The Lion Seeker, brings us Isaac Helger, son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, surviving the streets of Johannesburg in the shadow of World War II,Are you a stupid or a clever? ,Such is the refrain in Isaac Helgerâ€™s mind as he makes his way from redheaded hooligan to searching adolescent to striving young man on the make. His motherâ€™s question haunts every choice. ,Are you a stupid or a clever?, Will you find a way to lift your family out of Johannesburgâ€™s poor inner city, to buy a house in the suburbs, to bring your aunts and cousins from Lithuania? ,Isaacâ€™s mother is a strong woman and a scarred woman; her maimed face taunts him with a past no one will discuss. As World War II approaches, then falls upon them, they hurtle toward a catastrophic reckoning. Isaac must make decisions that, at first, only seem to be life-or-death, then actually are.,Meanwhile, South Africaâ€™s history, bound up with Europeâ€™s but inflected with its own accentsâ€”Afrikaans, Zulu, Yiddish, Englishâ€”begins to unravel. Isaacâ€™s vibrant, working-class, Jewish neighborhood lies near the African slums; under cover of night, the slums are razed, the residents forced off to townships. Isaacâ€™s fortune-seeking takes him to the privileged seclusion of the Johannesburg suburbs, where he will court forbidden love. It partners him with the unlucky, unsinkable Hugo Bleznick, selling miracle products to suspicious farmers. And it leads him into a feud with a grayshirt Afrikaaner who insidiously undermines him in the auto shop, where Isaac has found the only work that ever felt true. And then his motherâ€™s secret, long carefully guarded, takes them to the diamond mines, where everything is covered in a thin, metallic dust, where lions wait among desert rocks, and where Isaac will begin to learn the bittersweet reality of success bought at truly any cost.,A thrilling ride through the life of one fumbling young hero, ,The Lion Seeker, is a glorious reinvention of the classic family and coming-of-age sagas. We are caught â€” hearts open and wrecked â€” between the urgent ambitions of a mother who knows what it takes to survive and a son straining against the responsibilities of the old world, even as he is endowed with the freedoms of the new.
Fiction,Historical,Historical Fiction,Cultural,Africa,Southern Africa,South Africa,Literature,Jewish,War,Cultural,Canada,War,World War II,Novels,World War II,Holocaust
The Lion Seeker