Get Access The Lion Seeker Designed By Kenneth Bonert Accessible Through Document
historical saga of a Jewish family that emigrates from Lithuania to South Africa in the earlys.
Energetic writing, vivid characters, lots of conflict made the pages of this book fly by, Im ersten Teil erfahren wir, dass Isaac mit Mutter und Schwester aus einem kleinen Dorf in Lettland zu seinem Vater, der in Südafrika lebt und dort bereits eine Uhrmacherwerkstatt betreibt, auswandert.
Was dazu geführt hat erfahren wir nach und nach im Lauf der Geschichte,
Isaacs Mutter Gitelle ist sehr ehrgeizig und will für ihren Sohn alles erreichen, So verbietet sie ihm Kontakt mit den Einheimischen Schwarzen, denn Weiße haben diese zu verachten um anerkannt zu werden.
Energisch vertreibt sie die in ihren Augen faulen nichtsnutzigen Freunde ihres Mannes, die sich täglich in der Werkstatt auf dem Sofa breit machen und trinken.
Isaac kommt mehr schlecht als recht durch die Schulzeit, muss mehrmals wechseln da er sich nicht anpasst und landet nach ein paar Ausflügen in die fliegende Händlerszene von Hugo Bleznik in einer Werkstatt als Karrosseriebauerlehrling.
Issac muss immer wieder Rückschläge hinnehmen, da auch in Südafrika und mit aufkommen des Nationalsozialismus verstärkt die Juden diskriminiert werden.
Durch Intrigen verliert er seine Lehrstele und geht, nachdem er noch mit Hugo eine Recyclingfirma gegründet hat aus Enttäuschung über seine erfolglosen Versuche anerkannt zu werden in den Krieg.
Kenneth Bonert hat mich mit seiner Schilderung über das Leben eingewanderter Juden und da speziell Isaacs Familie völlig überzeugt.
Er nimmt kein Blatt vor den Mund, schildert alles sehr deutlich, manchmal brutal aber so ist das Leben und vor allem das Leben als Außenseiter der Gesellschaft.
Bonert hat mit diesem Buch seinem Großvater, der aus der gleichen kleinen Gemeinde, nämlich Dusat, stammt wie die Helgers, ein Denkmal gesetzt.
Wir erfahren die Gräuel, der Pogrome, die auch in Lettland schon vor den Nazis an der Tagesordnung waren aber auch von der Auslöschung der Familien auf grausamste Weise.
Das Buch ist keines, das man an einem Nachmittag am Strand lesen kann oder sollte sondern eines das zum Nachdenken und nachforschen anregt.
Der Stil ist nie langweilig, Orts oder Landschaftsbeschreibungen werden en passant mit eingeflochten, dass man sich die Gegend gut vorstellen kann.
Die Personen sind charakteristisch ob man sie mag oder nicht, man kann sie sich bildlich vorstellen und auch ihr Handeln sehr gut nachvollziehen, wenn auch nicht immer verstehen.
Interesting in terms of historical fiction, After awhile, the dialect gets a bit tiresome, Perhaps not so much if you didnt speak Yiddish or Afrikaans and needed all the translations, In general, I found it episodic, long winded, and, sometimes, with an unbelievable protagonist, Was he flawed Or just a Stupid When antisemitism hits Lithuania, a father moves from Lithuania to South Africa, starts a small watch business, and sends for his wife, Gitelle and two children.
The rest of Gitelle's sisters stay in Lithuania, Isaac, Gitelle's boy, is an active child, He has orange hair, freckles, and big ears, Not a student, he tries to be a "businessman," going into business with a character who likes to gamble on horses, who loses one business after another.
Isaac has a good job repairing bashed in cars, He does not make much money, but his hyperactivity is put to good use, Living in South Africa presents problems for Isaac, He sees the African black people as lower than himself, The way South Africa was set up at the time, Isaac was always the "superior" worker when black men worked with him.
Isaac was white, and felt superior, like Afrikaaners, but Isaac was Jewish, and he realized as he grew up, that he lost his girlfriend because he was Jewish, and the workers he liked, beat him to a pulp when he was framed by a racist Nazi sympathizer.
Before WWII began, and at the beginning of the war, the hatred of Jews in Lithuania and South Africa was at its apogee.
This is Isaac's story, his coming of age story, His youthful innocence prevented him from seeing the racism that was at its peak in South Africa, of both blacks and Jews.
Isaac trusted the wrong people and was duped over and over again, even at the job he loved when the Nazi sympathizer taunted him, played hateful tricks on him, and even got him fired.
Isaac's mother and father loved Isaac and always took care of him at his worst moments, When Isaac finally learned the whole truth about his mother, that she always hid from him, he began to understand life for what it was, but one dreadful decision alienated him from his parents.
. .
This was a fascinating story, and a good hard look at people who inhabit the earth, . .
Wow. WOW. Epic. The language will blow you away, of a time and a place you've never been to, but trust me, you want to go to.
It's brutal. It will tear you up, But now that I'm done I miss it, I want to go back and I'm sad that I'll never again get to have a first time there.
So if you read this and you should, now, please, savor it, This is a beautifully written book, It reminds me of Cutting for Stone Abraham Verghese and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitiz Mordecai Richler, A mans role in history: are we our own person or is our person shaped by those before us This is a beautiful but heartwrenching book about a Lithuanian family that immigrates to South Africa, fleeing the violence of the pogroms.
They arrive in a world where Jews are grouped with whites, ahead of the coloreds and of course the blacks in South Africa's racial hierarchy.
But as the situation in Europe worsens at the outset of World War II, antisemitism lives in South Africa as well, our protagonist, Isaac, a young boy at the time they immigrate who tries to make his way in an unraveling South Africa, is faced with life and death decisions that will haunt him forever and also change the course of his family's life.
This is a very wellrealized coming of age story that is combined with the heartbreaking background of the Holocaust and the racial tensions of earlyth century South Africa.
Highly recommended! I read this in preparation for a trip to South Africa to get a feel for the history of at least some of the Jewish community there.
I found it to be very engrossing, It's about a family that moved to South Africa in the earlys from Lithuania, where their town had experienced a brutal pogram.
They left with the hope that the rest of the family would eventually followand promises that they would find money to send for them.
When they arrived, they hoped to live as equals in society and to prosper, None of their hopes were so easy to attain, Interesting characters. Well. . now I feel empty.
To think that this world, . the humans of this planet, . continue the atrocities year after year, . decade after decade.
What things the human being is capable of is the scariest and most overwhelmingly frightening of all the animal kingdom.
I do have family from Lithuania, . will I pass this book to my daughters to read, . YES yes yes. Though it is a 'story', . the realities are still there,
Thank you Kenneth Bonert, Bonerts GG finalist novel, The Lion Seeker, was compelling right to the end, His ambitious protagonist of the title, while neither all that clever or nor all that likeable, was nevertheless very interesting, grappling with abuse and racism that of course is nightly news now as much as it has been since we evolved.
The violence is stomachturning, but no one is going to say the Holocaust or preApartheid SA deserves a kinder, gentler filter.
Stories once upon a time used to fall into patterns a la Frye: one person seeks another and after a bookfull of frustration finally achieves some kind of union, a heroic person overcomes a lot of evil to solve some sort of problem, person or persons simply flounder and accomplish nothing in end, or a person makes some big mistakes, harms others, and is severely punished, often killed.
That last one was where I thought we were going, Or. Gitelle was going to emerge as the hero, Alas, if it fits any pattern at all, irony prevails not much, compared to the devastation caused, is accomplished by Issac.
Or. The whole book is really more of a memoire or a tribute, Those arent necessarily bad things, of course, but the writing was worthy of Fiction, I have to sit on this one for a bit before I can clearly give my thoughts, The evil that human kind can produce and participate in is saddening, I hesitated to rate this book, It's set in South Africa with all the linguistic style it entails, and I don't particularly enjoy that, Whereas it's also a story of the world war ii or so it says on the blurb, and I love stories of the war.
It turned out to be surprisingly easy to read, but it wasn't a war story, Rather, it's a story of a young jewish man being brought up in South Africa, having been lucky enough to escape Lithuania when Hitler wasn't even a name.
Consequently, he is one of the unbelievers when it comes to the Jewish persecution in Europe, and his family and he himself suffers for it.
I think it was well written, It's an angle I hadn't heard about with regards to the world war ii Lithuanian immigrants to South Africa.
It's also a flawed protagonist story done right, It's painful to sit through the mistakes made by Isaac and those done to him, time and time again.
But it's also weirdly heartbreaking, even when he has it coming to him, I didn't even mind the romance with the shiksa girl, a rich princess who I can't really believe would give someone like Isaac the time of day in real life.
Once that initial hurdle is past, it's handled realistically enough i, e. , it crashes and burns.
Where it loses points for me is that it's too long, and it leaves out a prominent stage in Isaac's life.
He seems to have been shaped by the war, but the book skips right over the war, That's right it's a war story that never shows any action even though its main protagonist was an enlisted soldier and a prisoner of war.
It may have made this book into yet another world war ii soldier story, but I would have preferred that some pages in this massive book were given to it.
The romance goes on too long, and so does Isaac's childhood, But, the epilogue is what really disappointed me,
It's a South African book that, though massive, was easy enough to read, For that I'm glad. It could've been better though if certain portions were snipped and some were added to, and if I'd felt that the protagonist had come through a more meaningful arc.
stars. This is from an ARC sent to me by the publisher,
It's amazing how many stories there still are from the time of World War II so many different angles and perspectives, so many lives affected, all over the world.
And how relevant and searing these stories still are today,
This one is about a young Jewish boy living in Johannesburg after emigrating there with his family from Lithuania.
At a time when Jewish people the world over are about to be persecuted on the grandest scale, life for them in Johannesburg is low but of course they are still not the lowest of society.
Isaac Helger as a child mixes easily with other children in the streets, until his mother realizes and quickly puts an end to
those early friendships.
With little education and plenty of naivete, Isaac blindly fumbles his way into young adulthood, unable to figure out why he continually runs into brick walls.
His mother wants one thing for him and his father another, and he is caught in the middle, unsure of his own path.
Of course, he makes many mistakes along the way, and in the dramatic climate of the time and place, these mistakes are much more significant and dire than they perhaps would be otherwise.
Bonert crafts an incredible story, He brilliantly captures the dramatic beauty of the South African landscape juxtaposed with the seething heartbeat of city life.
He seamlessly blends the vernacular and nuanced cadences of all the people we meet in his Johannesburg streets and beyond Hebrew and Lithuanian Jewish, mixed in with Colonial English, Afrikaans and Black.
The cast of characters is as vast and varied and enriching as the setting, And the story moves at a breathless, heartstopping pace coming in at well overpages, it reads as quickly as something half that size.
In the bottomless well of stories of one particular time in history, this one stands out as it grabs you by the heart right from the beginning and does not let go right to the very end.
Stunningly rich and powerful. South Africans were once legally divided into so many categories, One unofficial category that many of us in the US don't often think of is South African Jews, This book tells the story of Isaac Helger, a workingclass Jewish man before, during, and after World War II whose main aspiration is to be a mechanic or an engineer.
His father is an artisan who loves his work, His wife, Isaac's mother, longs for a house in a more middleclass neighborhood and pushes Isaac to aspire to that.
She also begins to worry about her sisters in Lithuania,
Isaac gets a job in a large auto repair shop where he is the only Jew, and is viewed skeptically.
He loves his work.
His mother's goal shifts to bringing her sisters to South Africa, though the South African government has decreed that it doesn't want any more Jews.
Isaac's story plays out in the midst of South Africa's racism and increasingly visible antiSemitism, Isaac respects some Black Africans as workers but thinks of them as different, He becomes obsessed with a young, gentile woman from a wealthy family,
The story is powerful and complicated, .