by Elise Coop­er

The Lion Seek­er by Ken­neth Bon­ert spans a twen­ty-five year peri­od in South Africa. It delves into a Jew­ish family’s tri­als and tribu­la­tions as they jour­neyed from being immi­grants to striv­ing for advance­ment dur­ing the war-torn peri­od of the 1930s and 1940s.

Elise Coop­er: Why did you decide to write this novel? 

Ken­neth Bon­ert: It is an exer­cise in artis­tic self-expres­sion. I was inter­ested in my family’s roots and try­ing to under­stand myself bet­ter. I was curi­ous about why my fam­i­ly went to South Africa. My grand­moth­er, who lived with us, would tell sto­ries on what it was like for her. She had a lot of cul­ture shock com­ing from the shtetl in Lithua­nia. I want­ed to imag­ine this and cre­ate a nov­el for it. I named it The Lion Seek­er because I envi­sioned a lion as typ­i­cal of ambi­tion, glo­ry, and a part of Africa. There are a lot of lay­ers to the sym­bol of a lion. 

EC: Where did Jews fall on the spec­trum between whites and blacks? 

KB: Jews were con­sid­ered white, but dur­ing the peri­od in the book, the late 1930s, there was a lot of anti-Semi­tism. This was an era when Fas­cism was on the rise every­where. South Africa had the Grey Shirts, a Nazi-type move­ment that want­ed to enter the war on the side of the Ger­mans. Today, South African Jews are very proud of their her­itage. I remem­ber going to Jew­ish schools and grow­ing up in a Jew­ish environ­ment. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there still exist­ed that feel­ing that being Jew­ish drew some form of hatred. 

EC: Can you talk about your main char­ac­ter, Isaac Helger? 

KB: He is a work­ing-class, une­d­u­cat­ed guy. I based him on my uncles who worked in the auto indus­try in Johan­nes­burg: they were not the most refined. I hope I cap­tured some of their grit­ti­ness. Isaac is a com­plex char­ac­ter who has a side that can be real­ly sweet and anoth­er side that reflects the envi­ron­ment he grew up in, an intense­ly racist one. 

EC: Was Isaac a racist? 

KB: To por­tray a white per­son in South Africa in the 1930s I had to paint him with a racist atti­tude. This was an era when a black per­son had to get off the side­walk when a white per­son walked by. I want­ed to show how this ordi­nary Jew­ish fam­i­ly only looked out for them­selves. On the peck­ing order of the social hier­ar­chy they found them­selves in a supe­rior posi­tion to the blacks; how they han­dled this is a part of the book. 

EC: Through­out the book Isaac’s moth­er asks, ​“Are you stu­pid or clever?” Can you explain? 

KB: His moth­er, Gitelle, is obsessed with this. She is ruth­less­ly deter­mined to get her South African fam­i­ly out of pover­ty and to get her sis­ters out of Lithua­nia. She is very fix­at­ed on get­ting ahead. The point is to be smart to get ahead and advance the fam­i­ly eco­nom­i­cal­ly. She tries to instill this phi­los­o­phy in Isaac. It plays out in the course of the book. 

EC: There are a lot of con­tra­dic­tions in the book: black-white, stu­pid-clever, poor-rich, Jew-Gentile? 

KB: Yes there are, but there are a lot of con­tra­dic­tions to Isaac: he does and says things he regrets and then tries to make them right; he is intel­ligent but often does things that are dumb. South Africa is a coun­try with a lot of con­tra­dic­tions. It is a place of extremes, which I want­ed to con­vey, and the peo­ple who live there have many emo­tion­al ups and downs. 

EC: You just won the Edward Lewis Wal­lant Award for 2013. You must feel honored? 

KB: Yes, past win­ners have includ­ed: Leo Lit­wak, Chaim Potok, Cyn­thia Ozick, Dara Horn, and Nicole Krauss. I will be trav­el­ling to Hart­ford for an awards cer­e­mo­ny in the spring. The Lion Seek­er was also for­tu­nate to have won a Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award and been short­list­ed for the Gov­er­nor Gen­er­al’s Award here in Canada. 

EC: What do you want read­ers to get out of the book? 

KB: A good sto­ry that a per­son can get lost in. I want­ed it to have a com­plex­i­ty so that the read­er will think about it and get some­thing out of it. Oth­er than the racist angle no one reads about oth­er South African char­ac­ters. I see a com­par­i­son between the 1930s era and our times, and this is a scary obser­va­tion. There was the great eco­nom­ic crash and we have our debt cri­sis; there is also anti-Semi­tism hap­pen­ing then and now. 

EC: Is your next book going to be a sequel to this debut book? 

KB: I am work­ing on a col­lec­tion of short fic­tion that also deals with South African Jews, but more in the mod­ern time. It will be about the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties spread­ing from South Africa to all over the world from the past to the present. As for a sequel to The Lion Seek­er, I am inter­est­ed in writ­ing one that will bring the fam­i­ly into mod­ern times.

Elise Coop­er lives in Los Ange­les and has writ­ten numer­ous nation­al se­curity arti­cles sup­port­ing Israel. She writes book reviews and Q and A’s for many dif­fer­ent out­lets includ­ing the Mil­i­tary Press. She has had the plea­sure to inter­view best­selling authors from many dif­fer­ent genres.