I’m finding, as I get older, reading books that are thought-provoking or emotionally crushing (such as books on genocide) I have to read in stages. Because of the emotional discomfort The Lion Seeker brought, I started out not wanting to review it. It was painful to read, and it took me forever to get through it. Then weeks later, I realized the book was still haunting me and that I really needed to review it.
The Lion Seeker is a Jewish family saga in which Isaac Helger, the son of Lithuanian Jews who immigrated to South Africa before World War II when pogroms begin in Lithuania. They settle in a working class neighborhood near African slums. Isaac’s mother has ambitions for her son and hopes he can leave the poverty his family has endured behind, to have a better life, and to help bring her family from Lithuania. He’s more interested in running around his neighborhood, a young delinquent. He wants to do well, but like many young men, doesn’t have patience or the ability to think fully on his actions before he leaps into them. He first works moving furniture, and that job takes him into the suburbs and to his first love, a Gentile girl. His next foray is working in a garage where he is undermined by a gray shirt, the Afrikaner version of a Fascist. Finally, he works with Hugo Bleznick, the quintessential con man. I alternated between sympathy for Isaac and wanting to strangle him for his selfishness and cupidity.
His mother holds several secrets: the cause of the cut in the corner of her mouth that keeps her from speaking well and causes her to drool plus the full extent of damage to her and her family during the pogroms. When she withholds this knowledge from her son, she sets into motion the ultimate tragedy of this book.
This is a rough go but worth the endurance it requires.
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The Lion Seeker (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 15, 2013) is available through:
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You can read my reviews of other books on genocide:
Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin.
Roméo Dallaire’s Waiting for First Light and They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers
R.M. Romero’s The Dollmaker of Krakow
Ava Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman
Erin Litteken’s The Memory Keeper of Kyiv
Shari J. Ryan’s The Doctor’s Daughter
Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse
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