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DDC/MDS
809 |
Description
Shanti Behari Seth, brought up in India, was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin--though he could not speak a word of German--to study medicine and dentistry. Helga Gerda Caro, known to everyone as "Henny" was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family--cultured, patriotic, and intensely German. When the family decided to take Shanti as a lodger, Henny's first reaction was, "Don't take the black man!" But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Germany just one month before war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person in the country she knew: Shanti. Vikram Seth has woven together their story, which recounts the arrival into this childless couple's lives of their great-nephew from India--the teenage Vikram. The result is a tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
Between them, Shanti and Henny have personal experience of almost everything the twentieth century could throw at them. They became friends in Germany in the 1930s. Shanti was born into colonial India, injured while serving as an officer in the British Army during World War Two. Henny, a German Jew, escaped to England a month before war broke out. Her mother and sister died in the Holocaust.
This story would have been interesting in any hands. But Seth's love for the couple shines through, and makes it especially moving. Seth traces their story through letters, as well as conversations with Shanti and with other relatives and friends of the family. He has an unerring eye for the telling details, which means that his narration makes the well-known sequence of events horrific all over again. For example, he reproduces an exchange of 25-word telegrams between Henny and her mother and sister in the early 1940s, which were sent through the Red Cross. Almost comically short, all they say in effect is 'I am well, thinking of you, write soon'. But four months passed between each one.
And this book is no exception. Seth’s memoir focuses little on himself, mostly on his aunt and uncle. Shanti Uncle was
Seth’s treatment of his beloved relatives, their heartbreaking trials and the intense disappointments of their lives is both gentle and honest. It is a story that investigates race, nationality, war and family, and clearly a book that has taken Seth himself on a difficult personal journey. Traveling with him, the reader is invited to look at issues both historical and contemporary, but always within the compassionate frame of an intimate family portrait.
Shanti Seth was born in India and in 1931 moves to Berlin to study dentistry. He ends up rooming in a Mrs. Caro's house, despite Mrs. Caro's daughter Henny advising her mother not to take in the black man. Despite this initial impression, Shanti and Henny become friends and the two of them have a busy social life in Berlin. In 1939 Henny flees the coming Holocaust and with the aid of her fiancé’s father escapes to London. A year later Shanti joins the British Army's Dental Corp. He serves in North Africa and Italy, is seriously injured in the battle for Monte Cassino, and returns to London to continue his dental career. Henny has been in London since the war began, and the two of them continue a rather lopsided relationship until they are married in 1951.
The memoir has the potential to be fascinating: an Indian man's relationship with a Jewish girl in pre-war Berlin, the loss of her family and many friends in the Holocaust, and her extensive correspondence with friends in post-war Germany. However, I found reading the book rather like being stuck watching someone's interminable home movies. Shanti fails to share with his nephew any insights into his life, so the account is rather flat and uninspired. Henny is more complex with secrets that are only revealed through correspondence discovered after her death. Unfortunately she didn't keep copies of all of her letters, so too often the account is construed from what friends wrote to her. This reading between the lines is frustrating and leads the author to assumptions that can never be proved.
To balance the personal stories, Vikram adds occasional chapters meant to provide historical background, but he is not an historian, and the chapters stick out like the interruptions they are. So the book ends up neither fish nor fowl, neither interesting history nor compelling personal narrative. During the last section, when the author returns to the present and his uncle’s decline, I began wishing the book would just end. Then came the reading of the will and the inevitable ensuing family drama. The end was a welcome relief.
Seth here has a go at applying his novelist's insight to untangling the various threads in his personal relationship with, and understanding of, his great uncle and great aunt. In the process, he brings out some interesting ideas about the ways extended families and groups of friends ("Wahlverwandschaften") work, the way we relate to people of different generations in different stages of our lives, and how little we sometimes know about the significant events in the lives of people we are close to. This works very well, and I found a lot in this aspect of the book that I could identify with.
The book works rather less well when you read it as conventional biography. The non-chronological structure is sometimes confusing or requires a lot of repetition for us to keep track of the sequence of events, particularly in the section that is based on Henny's surviving letters from the 1940s; there are big chunks of historical background material that will be redundant for almost all readers; there are some areas of his subjects' lives that we would gladly know less about (their health problems in old age, for instance), and others that Seth seems strangely uninterested in, like Henny's working life.
A little disappointing, perhaps, but definitely worth reading.
The most heart-wrenching part of the book for me was the part containing Henny's correspondance with her German friends after the war trying to learn what had happened to her Mother and sister. It is an up-close and personal look at the sorrow and suffering repeated millions to times over during the holocaust. And, in addition to the anguish of learning about the fate of her family, Henny had to deal with her ambivalent feelings toward her non-Jewish friends. She even received a letter from her former German boyfriend, who had played the part of a good Nazi during the war, hinting at an interest in a continuing relationship. She also learns that her brother was able to flee to South American prior to the war but had squandered money that could have been used to get her mother and sister out of Germany. She was particularly disturbed to learn that the husband of one of her closest friends may have been a member of the Nazi SA.
In England the only person Henny knew who shared any memories of her family and former life was Shanti. Shanti's life on the other hand was dramatically changed by the loss of his arm. So they found comfort in each other’s company. They eventually got married, but the slow deliberate pace of their courtship indicates little romantic passion.
The author spends considerable time talking about world politics and the modern history of Germany and Israel. He also shares some details of settling Shanti's estate after his death. I question whether these parts of the book were needed.
This one
Reading 500 pages about people who are only remotely related to Vikram Seth is quite a struggle, especially if one wonders why one would read a book like that. Althought the book does tell the reader something about the young Vikram Seth, that would barely be enough motivation to read a tome like this.
The distance in the relationship shows equally in the way the authors deals with the material. The first biography is distanced, and confusing as the story jumps across history and places, alternately referring to the great-Uncle using different names, such as Uncle Shanti and the Shanti-Uncle, Shanti, etc. While Shanti B. Seth led an interesting life, there are no doubt countless other anonymous people who have lived equally or even more interesting lives.
The second live describes the biography of Seth's great-Aunt, Henny Gerda Caro. Much time is invested into describing the horrible fate of the great-Aunt's German Jewish family, most of whose family members perished during the holocaust. Here, the author's descriptions of their fate are so incredibly horrendous and hard that they can barely be seen as being written by a family member. Here he describes the death of his great-Aunt's sister, Lola:
Lola's naked body, groteskly contorted, possibly broken-boned, her face blue and unrecognisable and bleeding from mouth and nose, her legs streaked with shit and blood, would, after a hosing-down, have been dragged out of the room, possibly with a noose and grappling-hook, to a large lift that would have taken her together with the man others up to the ground floor of the building. Here, in the furnace room, a trolley would have moved her body along to continue the procedure. Any gold teeth she might have had would have been broken out of her mouth with pliers, and she would have been tipped out of the trolley into one of the fifteen cast-iron ovens. She would have been disposed of in about twenty minutes, her own residual fat helping to sustain the heat of the oven, thus saving fuel.
The description of the holocaust and how it affected the family of his aunt takes up the largest part of the book. Clearly, the author must have been filled with a fascination or horror to write this part of family history out of his system.
Obviously, while some writers write about what they think their readers or publishers might like, Vikram Seth is known for his idiosyncratic choice to write about what fascinates him, breaking any taboo or convention, to pursue what interests him. This is the prerogative of the author.
The book is divided into five independent parts, each approaching different facet of the story. It starts off with the young Vikram Seth arriving to live with his aunt and uncle while he attends school in England, and his perceptions of them. Then, we learn about Shanti's life, then Henny's, then their life together. I was expecting the book to be more narrative than it was; a large portion of it quotes various interviews and letters. Much of the narration that accompanies the quotes seems more like annotation or clarification of context. At first, I found this annoying, but I got used to it.
The story of Shanti and Henny is certainly makes fascinating reading. Shanti is a Hindu from India who studies dentistry in Germany, and Henny is the daughter of the Jewish family he boards with while doing so. However, their love story blossoms in England. Both of them are remarkable people in their own right – Shanti is a much-loved practising dentist, even though he lost one of his arms in World War II. Henny's story is quite tragic; her mother and sister do not make it out of Germany, and she has to face many truths about her family and friends after the war is over. I think her correspondences were the most interesting part of the book – we got an intimate look at how she coped with a tragedy of the magnitude of the Holocaust. She always remained incredibly dignified and restrained, though.
At times, I found myself wishing that the book was a little more focused. It seemed like Seth structured the book around trying to present every bit of information that he had (especially about Henny), rather than build a cohesive narrative. At other times, I appreciated the tangents and extra details about the couple's family and friends.
I also had mixed feelings about the author talking about his own feelings at various points in the book. On the one hand, they made it feel more intimate – he is in fact, writing about the aunt and uncle that he loves and respects, so it's nice to see that come through. On the other hand, some of the things he said seemed superfluous and distracting; for instance, he talks about the different areas of the world and technologies that Germany has had an impact on (including some thoughts on the future.)
Originally posted on my blog.