The Lion Seeker
Rooted in Bonert’s personal experience growing up in a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family in South Africa before WWII, this novel will grab readers everywhere with the story of the struggling refugees in a new country, the horror they escaped from, and the guilt about those left behind, with secrets not revealed until the very end. Isaac turns 20 in 1938, starts work as an apprentice panel-beater (auto-body restorer) in Johannesburg (though he would like to get rich quick) and has a hidden relationship with a gentile girl. Always, his parents are haunted by the anti-Semitic pogroms they escaped, and then, with the news of the Nazi massacres, Isaac tries to help his mother collect money to bring her sisters to safety. But who is stealing the money? Why won’t his rich uncle help? In a narrative laced with Yiddish idiom, the immigrant family struggle comes across as universal, whether concerning radicals or the ultra-Orthodox, and so is the blindness to those oppressed in the new country (in Africa, a Jew is a White man). A great choice for book-group discussion. --Hazel Rochman