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Overview
Called “a latter-day Exodus” by Kirkus Reviews, The Lion Seeker is an epic historical novel centered on the life of Isaac Helger. The son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, he runs around the streets of Johannesburg as a young hooligan and dreams of getting rich. But his parents are still haunted by the memories of the anti-Semitic pogroms they escaped, even as Isaac secretly pursues a relationship with a gentile girl.
As the Nazi threat rises, Isaac is caught between his mother’s urgent ambition to bring her sisters to safety out of the old world, and his own desire to enjoy the freedoms of the new. But soon his mother’s carefully guarded secret takes them to the diamond mines, where mysteries are unveiled in the desert rocks and Isaac begins to learn the bittersweet reality of success bought at any cost.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547898414 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 576 |
| Sales rank: | 426,897 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SKOTS SAYS IT'S FUNNY how soft the bottoms of Isaac's feet are — man he's always getting thorns or glass stuck in them that everyone else just runs right over. He says it goes with Isaac's funny hair like grated carrots and all the freckles on his face that make it look like them white cheeks was sprayed with motor oil or something; goes with those funny shorts about twenty sizes too big that he can only wear cos his da has made all those extra baby holes in the belt for him. Skots laughs and says also maybe the soft feet have to do with Isaac's skin that turns red as anything from one little tiny poke of the sun, and also look how skinny your legs are man, like two spaghettis.
They are all sitting in the burnt-out piece of veld behind Nussbaum's kosher butchery, eating a pigeon that Isaac shot off the phone wire with his catty when everyone else missed, and suddenly everyone goes all quiet, Isaac feeling them watching him. All he can hear is the noise from Beit Street, a tram clanging and rumbling, Yiddish shouts from the men selling fruit or bread or coal or ice.
Isaac looks slowly at Skots. — You calling me something hey Skots?
Skots seems to ponder the question, bunching and opening his toes in the dust at the edge of the firepit they'd scratched and packed with tomato-box wood since turned to greyblack ashes. Pigeon bones and pigeon grease lie on top; singed feathers still smoking.
Isaac says, — If you not bladey calling me something you better shut your bladey trap, know that Skots.
The others wait. Isaac watching Skots, thinking maybe he'd be a Stupid and try jump at him like last time, Skots a taller older boy with muscles in his arms like hard little apples. But that other time he'd gotten the thumb in his teeth and bitten so hard, to the bone, making Skots cry like a girl, saying I give, I give. Isaac gets his heels under him and leans forward.
Charlie, looking from one to the other, quick and nervous, says, — Hey hey you all know what? And starts telling them about a man was so crazy, so moochoo in his head, that he was doing these very bad things that he, Charlie, has seen with his own two eyes.
— What bad things? says Isaac, staring at Skots.
Charlie doesn't want to tell, but after they press him and he tells them everything, Isaac starts to feel hot and sick. His eyes and his throat grow full. He doesn't care about Skots no more, or about anything else. He stands up. — Lez go get him! Lez get that bladey bastid.
When Isaac runs, the others follow. No hesitation. They pass through the alley next to Nussbaum's and into the noise and motion of Beit Street, the Yiddisher jabber of the sellers and the horses pulling carts and the bicycles ching-chinging and the Packards hooting and the doubledecker tram with its twirly stairs rumbling off down the middle of the street, scratching loose blue sparks from the wires above. On the corner, cages of gabbling chickens are stacked high and farther down the iceman with heavy gloves is unloading blocks wrapped in straw from his horse cart. There are tables of vegetables and the noises of sawing and banging from Dovedovitz and tinking noises from Katz the tinsmith while down the next alley the blacksmith's forge glows orange hot, and all along in front of the long covered stoep there are Xhosa women on the side of the street sitting with their legs sideways on their bright blankets with their trinkets of ivory and stinkwood. Behind the glass of the butcher shops there hang black logs of salt-cured biltong and fat bottleblue flies mass on the blooded gobs of sawdust swept into the gutter with the smelly chunks of horse kuk.
On the far side of Beit Street, beyond the shops, they run between row houses with roofs of corrugated iron. It gets quiet here: just their breathing, their patting feet. Lizards on whitewash in the bright sun. They run till the asphalt ends and the dirt is hard as steel, pocked with holes or the glitter of quartz. Here at the end of the road is an open-sided square of tin houses with a single water tap in the middle on the open dirt, where women line up with squalling babies lashed to their backs and clinking buckets in their hands. Men sit on newspapers in the afternoon glow, children wrestle and shout. Someone is playing a guitar made of rubber bands and pieces of a detergent box.
They slow. Isaac touches the catty in his back pocket, a nice one he made from some inner tube stretched on a Y of strong wood; shoots stones beautifully hard and straight. He turns on Charlie. — Where is he, wherezit?
— Hang on, says Charlie. They watch him run to the far corner of the square where there's a gap in the tin and he looks around, then comes jogging back shaking his head. — He not there yet.
— Lez go back and play by the chains park there.
— Lez go to the churu man and tell him kuk banana.
— We staying here, says Isaac. We staying here till he comes. Charlie, you keep an eye.
They wander down to a door where Isaac lets Skots go first. Dark coming in from the bright and sudden close smells of mielie pap and sour piss. Now he sees the table made of cardboard boxes with a bedsheet on it with pictures of strawberries and cigarette holes. Auntie Peaches is there: she passes them sweet real coffee in an old Horlicks jar — coffee he's not allowed at home but Mame will never find out. Coffee to wash down the taste of the charred pigeon. He takes his sip and passes on. Bad coughing rips through the tin wall. Auntie Peaches pokes his tummy. — How's the little devil hey, hey? Little devilhead, little troublemaker.
He rolls on his back with his knees up, giggling. This is happiness in the close feel of this homely space. But Charlie comes shouting: — Ouens, ouens, hy's hier die bliksem!
Guys, guys, the bastard's here.
Outside the sun burns a white disc through a passing cloud as they run to the corner and turn into the alley there, sausages of kuk underfoot to dodge. At the end is the rubbish place that used to be a hole but is now a little rubbish mountain and in front of it is the madman.
— Is the puppy man, says Davey. Thaz the puppy man.
— I know him, says Nixie. He try sell them every day all around.
Puppyman is tall and wears only armless dungaree overalls with holes in them, too big for his lean frame, his cap is stuffed in a back pocket and his head is bald in spots and he is missing one sock and the heel flaps on one shoe. He sways on his feet with a small bottle in one hand. On the ground in front of him is a tall cardboard apple box. Things are moving in that box. He bends down and takes out a little dog that's white with black spots, puts it carefully on top of two stacked bricks and stands looking down at it.
— Come on, says Isaac. But his heart is hammering very big in him and he goes slowly and can feel no one wants to come with as they follow behind. Puppyman looks bigger and bigger the closer he gets. Puppyman has deep wrinkles everywhere in his face like they cut in with a knife. Isaac says to him, — Scuse hey, what you doing with that liddel dog?
Takes a while for Puppyman to find his focus, squinting down at Isaac. — Why you care? You wanna buy?
— How much? says Isaac.
— Ach you got no monies, lightie. Piss off now. Voetsak!
The pup is standing up on the bricks, the whole of its fat-bellied body trembling; then it squats at the back and some pee runs off the bricks. It's true that Puppyman doesn't look right in the head. His eyes are yellowish and full of red veins and it's like they are covered over with glassy webs. He takes a drink from that bottle and talks some kind of nonsense to himself. His breath smells like petrol. There's dirt crusted in some of the blobs of his hair, and bits of maybe paint or something also. He has red blistery sores on one side of his mouth and not many teeth.
— You the puppy man, says Isaac. You musn't hurt that dog.
— I'm the puppy man, says Puppyman. Is what I am. Is true. He turns and takes a long step, swings his leg like a soccer player: a grunt with the meatbone thud, the puppy only huffs one tiny squeak. It arcs high, drops onto the rubbish and rolls, flops, lies still and strewn as a rag. Puppyman lifts the bottle, wipes his mouth and talks low to himself.
Isaac feels sick right through.
— All you little buggers go piss off, says Puppyman. Is my stock, I does what I want with my own stock. Isaac stares at the box behind Puppyman. Another one moving in there, a bigger one. Puppyman mutters and turns to it. He is so tall and the muscles in his shoulders stand out like they carved in wood and the elbows look pointy as spears, the forearms wrapped in veins like snakes.
Isaac lifts his arms. Behind him Nixie says, — We better go hey. He drinking meths, that.
Skots: — He big and mad.
Charlie: — He's cooked in the head. He gone moochoo.
Nixie: — Lez go tell someone.
— Izey? Hey Izey, no man. Izey!
But Isaac is already moving.
CHAPTER 2BUXTON STREET, NUMBER FIFTY-TWO, a corner house. Isaac stops at the front door and the dog on the leash of onionsack string sits at his ankle. Through the window next to the door Isaac sees the business desk with the adding machine, the big black order book and the cashbox. The wall calendar says 1927 in red letters and also JHB which are some of the letters he knows how to read even though he hasn't started school yet. Means Johannesburg which is Joburg, where they live. He puts up a hand to cover the glare and looks past the front into the workshop where he also sleeps at night on a foldaway cot. Tutte is there at his bench, bent over; his left foot flat and his bad foot resting up on the low stool. All around him the boxes heap up, holding the gutted clock and watch parts, the springs, cogs, clock faces, clock hands. There's tiny brass tubes in there that give a nice chime if you tap them with tiny hammers, so tiny you can put them on the fingernail of your pinky. On the bench he sees the long half-circle of the lathe attached by a spring cord in a figure eight to the electric motor that powers it. There's mineral oil in long-nosed bottles, piled rags overspilling a shoebox. Tutte uses some screws that are thin as hairs, as eyelashes. Tutte with the magnifying loupe sticking from his right eye like a permanent growth. Tutte — he fixes time.
But when Isaac looks down at the white dog he knows it's not ganna do any good to even ask him.
There's a long laneway behind all the houses. Number fifty-two is on the corner where the alley makes a turn and opens onto Buxton Street, Beit Street just a little way up. Isaac turns into the alley and starts down. His back hurts when he walks, right in the middle where the bottle got him, and he's sure there'll be a lekker fat bruise there tomorrow if there isn't one already. Yas, but he was lucky that the big man tripped and fell over. He can't hardly believe he did what he did — all happened so quick. He pushed him and got the dog and ran and when he looked back Puppyman was getting up and chucking the bottle. He'd ducked his head down and that's when he got whacked hard, didn't feel it then only later once he'd climbed up over the rubbish and behind him the others gave it to Puppyman with their catties so that he chased them instead.
He had climbed down the far side of the rubbish and gone over the railway tracks and made a big circle coming home. Stopping a few times to give the little dog water and rinse him off in a horse trough. So little and shivery it is. He ties the leash to a nail in the brick wall, feels its hot little chest and the heart inside going pumpapumpa. You alive still. I got you.
He goes on by himself and the alley turns and he comes around the side of his house to the gateway at the back without a gate, just a gap in the low wall of cracked purple bricks. He stands there watching her in the backyard, a solid wide woman with thick arms in the short sleeves of her handmade dress, one sleeve stuffed with her handkerchief, the muscles in her forearms crinkling as she works, hanging up the wash. Her mouth has that familiar bunched expression, one side smeared pink with scar tissue that runs over the cheek to the jawbone like melted candle wax. The forehead is wide and freckled like his, and the gingerish hair, darker progenitor of his own, is worn back and clipped flat. Without looking at him she says: — Nu, voo iz der chulleriuh?
Where is what? he says, the same language automatic.
You heard. Don't pretend. That piggish cholera, an animal to kill us all in our home.
It's not true.
There's a snigger: Rively at the kitchen door. He punches at her, the bladey tattletale. She musta seen him outside with it.
Now Mame's looking at him, her wide warm face shaking slowly at his rage. My little Isaac, she says, and she smiles her halfsmile, one side clawed down by the scar. He runs to her, folds against her, feels her square hands on his back and her kiss on his crown. You're the beautiful little one, she says, only you. You're my boy, my rainbow, aren't you?
Mame, Mame. I got him for you.
Are you my clever one?
He's wrapped his little arms around her hips and her hands are at the back of his head, the heat of her soft belly eases through the apron into his pressed cheek.
It's all right, love. You take me and show me what you have brought for your mame. Because you are my Clever.
Yes Mame, I'm your Clever.
Tell me the two kinds in this world.
The Clevers and the Stupids.
That's right. And what are you?
I'm a Clever, Mame, I'm your Clever.
Come, Clever. Show me.
They go hand in hand to the puppy dog, sitting flat on its back legs, loose tongue unscrolled.
It looks a thirsty one, she says. How did you get it?
I asked for him. For free I got him.
Someone gave for free in the street?
Yes, free. A present.
Who was it?
He doesn't answer. She's looking down, scrapes loose a sound like someone readying to spit. He sinks and reaches for the dog but she yanks him back. — Sish! she says. Disgust! Don't touch your eyes. Can go blind. Now we'll have to boil up water to wash you good.
Wash?
Filthy animal from you don't even know where it's been. Gives you warts. A fever.
He shakes his head. The dog is watching him, his face. It tries Mame and its tail quivers then droops.
Backhome I remember how the poyers used to put such a dog with a stone in the lake and finished.
No!
She turns his chin, looks down at him. What you so upset? If I told you to go and do that, your mame, would you?
No.
— Neyn?
— Neyn!
You see, so you don't listen to Mame. If you had said yes to me, because you're a good boy, so then you could keep him.
He thinks on this, gnaws his bottom lip. Feels his eyes start to glisten. No, I would have, Mame. I would listen and say yes.
Don't make up grannystories now. It's written a thousand truths can't clean one lie. Come inside.
He pulls against her, stretching down. The dog whines, licks at his fingertips.
See how you don't listen, not even what I am telling to you this second. Leave it.
Pleading, he reaches for another language: — Oh Ma. Oh Ma please. He's not dirty. Auntie Peaches gave him to me and I washed him also, look how clean.
She stiffens as if slapped. Turns very slowly. What did you just say?
Now they are moving across the crowded jumble of Beit Street traffic then down the long stoep under the tin roof. Ma pulling him by the hand and the little dog on its string behind. At the end of the block: Is this the place? Is this it? But he can't speak. People are looking. Mr. Epstein the tailor next door comes out with a tape measure looping his skinny neck, his sharp nose twitching, pretending not to listen. A tram rumbles past while a truckload of dirty workers sitting on burlap sacks of coal passes on the other side, the men singing Zulu together, a mingled wave of sound deep and sweet and sad through the traffic. Outside Siderman's dry goods they're brooming shmootz off the edge of the stoep.
Mame shakes his arm. This the place or not?
It's the churu grocery on the corner and he peers in. Where they come to steal naartjies and Cadbury's chocs. Round rock candy gobstoppers that everyone calls niggerballs. They come in here, the five of them, and one will sing a mocking song to make the churu get cross and chase him while the other ones lift the things. Singing,
Hurry churu Hurry curry Kuk banana Two for tickey No bonsela
Churu, dirt word for Indian, never fails to get the man shouting and lunging. Mame is starting to get cross herself. Why did he have to tell her this place? It just jumped into his mind.
Now he looks inside and the proprietor behind the desk, with thick eyelids half down against the evening light, lifts up his fly swatter as a warning. Isaac's face he knows. Calls him the little redhair rubbish.
— She's not here, Isaac says.
Where is she then? says Mame. You know where she lives?
— No Ma.
How can you not?
— Ma, she was here, here's where she give him to me, I —
He stops because he's seeing someone behind her. She is coming to the churu shop like they sometimes do. He had been counting on no one being here, but here she is crossing the street and Mame turns to watch where he's watching. Not Auntie Peaches or Marie. Auntie Sooki.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lion Seeker"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Kenneth Bonert.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Gitelle: A Prologue,
Doornfontein,
Lion's Rock,
Greenside,
Rively: An Epilogue,
Acknowledgements,
Reading Group Guide,
Sample Chapter from THE MANDELA PLOT,
Buy the Book,
About the Author,
Connect with HMH,
What People are Saying About This
"A remarkably assured debut, The Lion Seeker is a riveting, lyrical, and profound journey towards the intersection of private lives and public destinies. Kenneth Bonert has all the makings of a major novelist."
—Charles Foran, author of Mordecai: The Life and Times
"The Lion Seeker is no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle-fight raw. A historical novel that feels desperately current; a Rosenburg and Juliet love story shorn of all sentiment; a stock-taking of human brutality and its flip side, our capacity to reach beyond our limitations and be better, all rendered in prose so expert, so fine honed that it belies the adjective ‘debut.’ It joins classics like J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart in the canon, and renders the South African experience universal. A first-round knock-out for Kenneth Bonert."
—Richard Poplak, author of Ja No Man: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa
"This powerful novel begins with a mystery that propels its characters through their difficult lives in prewar South Africa and haunts their actions until a dramatic and searing climax based on the Holocaust in Lithuania. The Lion Seeker is vivid and illuminating, astonishing in its range and toughness, and simultaneously an expression of love and regret for all that has been lost."
—Antanas Sileika, author of Underground and Woman in Bronze and Director of the Humber School for Writers
Interviews
A Conversation with Kenneth Bonert, Author of The Lion Seeker
Why did you choose this story to tell?
I'm not sure I chose it as much as it chose me. It's a story that has lived in my blood and haunted my thoughts for as long as I can remember. My ancestors moved from a tiny village in Lithuania to make new lives in faraway Africa -- how strange and dazzling the dry, gritty plains must have been to them after the soft pine forests of the north. I always wanted to capture the drama of that great familial movement with a book that would give voice to all that I imagined it contained: achievement and heartbreak, love and cruelty, the melancholy of separation and joy of arrival.
In the writing of The Lion Seeker I brought to life the Helger family, and traced their African struggles and the fate of the village they left behind. Isaac Helger is the book's tough centre. He burns with a raw, primal ambition and once I had found his voice the story surged ahead under my fingers. When readers tell me that they were up reading the book till two in the morning, it pleases but doesn't surprise me since I found the story just as compelling when I wrote the first draft, needing to know what happens next to struggling Isaac in the harsh country of my birth at a brutal time in its history.
Can you talk about the connection between your own background and the novel?
I grew up in Johannesburg, ensconced in the Jewish community (Jewish schools, Jewish friends, Jewish neighbours). My Bohbee - grandmother - lived at home with us and spoke only Yiddish. Sitting with her in the garden under the hot African sun, I would listen to her stories of the village of Dusat in the old country, a place her spirit never seemed to have left. It was a fairy-tale village to me, with a lake that magically became white and solid enough to walk on, a forest full of picture-card Christmas trees, enormous stallions, home-baked bread smeared with butter from a beloved cow. Researching this book was a way for me to find out how much truth there was in what she had told me. Similarly, this novel is also about the gulf between our dreams and lofty illusions and the harshness, the chintzy vulgarity, of the real world. The backdrop to our protected lives was of course an infamous regime of racial oppression. History and politics always press at the garden walls, no matter how high, just as they can warp the contours of a life. This is a novel that is also about a young man learning, through his own, to recognize the suffering of others.
I had two uncles who work in the auto industry. The family name is still on a company that one of them founded. He used to visit my grandmother every Sunday. He was a tough and fascinating character to me, a man who dropped out of school early to fight in the Second World War, who had earned his living with his hands in workshops and scrapyards before starting up an auto body shop of his own. A man who'd lived a life with its share of violence and struggle. He exemplified the kind of characters that I wanted to capture in literature for the first time. Rough-hewn, plain-speaking South African Jews, a type of Jewish character I had not seen depicted before. Above all, I wanted to capture the way that people really speak, the mashup of slang and other languages, the dirty music of Johannesburg streets.
Who or what is "The Lion Seeker"?
I leave it to the reader to find their own answer to this question. For me it has to do with why we as human beings do the things that we do, to ourselves and each other; it has to do with that force which animates the joyous tragedy of this thing we call life. There is one strange, almost mystical story told by a key character near the middle of the novel; it's about an old desert lion stalking a camp fire. Something about that story is connected to the heart of this question, but to try and put it into words would be to rob the reader of the chance to make their own discovery. Such unlayerings of subtler meanings is, for me, one of the sweeter pleasures of reading a serious novel.
Do you see The Lion Seeker as fitting into a particular literary tradition?
I think my literary ideal is to tell an absorbing, action-filled story without losing the depth of insight and poetic expression of serious fiction. The Lion Seeker is, therefore, a novel that draws on classical storytelling as its structure, but looks to modernism for its themes and prose. In other words, I love both Tolstoy and Joyce for different reasons, but just as much.
Of course The Lion Seeker could also be categorized as a Jewish novel or a South African novel, and it certainly draws on both of those great lineages. In storied Jewish-American writers such as Ozick, Malamud, Roth and Bellow, I found examples of how literature could be made from the people that made me, the community I grew up in. (Especially Roth with his relentless focus on the Jews of Newark.)
As for South African fiction, it has, for a long time, been concerned with the horrors of apartheid. That burning political issue left little cultural space for other kinds of stories. Now that apartheid has thankfully passed into oblivion, there is more room, I think, to tell the story of the South African Jews, and I've gone back to their first generation in South Africa with this debut novel. To be a white Jew in black Africa is fascinating territory to explore, and it's where my next work continues to take me.
Who have you discovered lately?
I read and reread the masters, mostly, nowadays - Nabokov, Hemingway, Austen, and the like. But I also make a point of regularly and methodically exposing myself to new writers, writers I've never heard of before. Most of these works, I end up not finishing; but some are lovely discoveries to make and to learn from. Three writers that occur to me in this latter list are: Tom Rachman with The Imperfectionists, which was a zippy 2010 book full of wit and cunning; Matt Sundell who had a story in the Paris Review called "Toast" that makes me keep an eye out for his name; and Wells Tower, whose 2009 collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was a recommendation from a bookstore - my favourite places! - -that I've much enjoyed.
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