SALISBURY - A large, 17th-century stone house stands at the end of a narrow street, facing a small church. A heavy door opens. "Are you looking for Vikram?" a young man asks. "He's at the lake." Through the back door, one finds the lake of the town of Salisbury, some two hours from London by car. Vikram - the Indian-born writer and poet Vikram Seth - has gone for a walk. He is wearing blue rubber boots and carrying a long walking stick, like a British lord. He is pleasant, short of stature, energetic and alert. We pause outside for a few more moments and start to walk back toward the house. The poet George Herbert once lived in this house, Seth says. He came here in 1630 and was the rector of the small church across the way, Saint Andrew's Church.
Seth divides his time between Delhi and London, and has been living here for four years. He says he hadn't thought about living in the country, but he saw a newspaper advertisement, decided to have a quick look at the home, and was smitten.
The house is large, with many rooms, full of wooden furniture and sitting corners, works of art from every possible culture, innumerable books and discs, a room with a piano, an electric organ and sheet music.
 |
Advertisement |
|
Seth, 55, the author of "A Suitable Boy" and "An Equal Music," is truly a Renaissance man. He is painstaking and profound, and releases books only every few years. He writes poetry, novels and music. In addition to Hindi and English, he speaks German, Chinese and a bit of ancient Chinese and Sanskrit. He also practices Chinese and Arabic calligraphy, and can explain the difference between them. The house has a special room for books in Arabic and Persian and books in Indian languages, including a row of court rulings - his mother was the first female judge in India to be appointed court president - and he reads them, looking for human stories. He does not drive a car, but rather travels by train or taxi. And he writes by hand.
Jews and Hindus
Suddenly he asks about the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. He wants to know about the final sentence. Does God make peace only for all the children of Israel, or for all human beings? he wants to know. He goes up to the second floor, and starts pulling out the books, documents and records he used to write his most recent book. He pulls out a thick file, the fruit of extensive research at the Yad Vashem archive in Jerusalem.
Seth's most recent book, "Two Lives," is a memoir based on the life of his uncle, who married a Jewish woman from Berlin who lost her family in the Holocaust. The book (now being published in Hebrew by Kinneret Publishing House, and translated by Dina Markon) tells the story of his Uncle Shanti Seth and his Auntie Henny Caro.
"In India we concentrate on Indian history," says Seth. "I didn't know much about it [the Holocaust]. Through general reading you do know about Hitler, persecutions, even about modern Israel. If it hadn't been for my aunt, almost certainly I wouldn't have gone into it or been concerned about it. The Jewish presence in India wasn't so strong.
"There's a sort of similarity in the way Hindus and Jews behave. They both belong to social religions - they are eating a lot, meeting a lot, being very hospitable, but as far as religious belief is concerned - they are not similar. But among a certain class of the two peoples, religion is not a crucial thing, and the community is much more important. So you can find atheistic Hindus and atheistic Jews, who are basically still Hindus and still Jews. I first noticed that when I was in Israel and had a Sabbath meal. The good-byes - from the time you say good-bye to the time you actually walk out the door - took about 45 minutes! I thought this is like being in Delhi."
Finding Henny
Uncle Shanti Behari Seth was born in 1908 in India to an educated family, and as a young man he went to study dentistry in Berlin. He rented a room in the home of the Jewish Caro family, with the mother and her two daughters, Henny and Lola. Henny, also born in 1908, was engaged to Hans. Shanti became friends with her friends and acquaintances, and was treated like a family member. A month before World War II broke out, Henny escaped to England. Her mother and sister remained in Berlin. Shanti was drafted into the British army, and served as a military doctor. He lost an arm in battle. Shanti and Henny stayed in touch, and after the war they married. They lived together for many years, and had no children. When the young Vikram Seth came to study in England at age 17, he lived in their North London home. They took him in, taught him German and the relationship between them grew deeper.
In 1994, a few years after Aunt Henny died of cancer, Seth decided to tell their life story. He interviewed Uncle Shanti many times, but did not know enough to tell Henny's story, because she had not spoken much about herself. Then one day, in the attic of their home, he discovered a literary treasure: an old box containing dozens of letters Henny had received from relatives in Germany before, during and after the war; letters she had written; and some old photo albums and forgotten books, including a Reform Jewish prayer book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in German and Hebrew.
Through the letters, Seth learned how Henny coped with the death of her mother and sister, and how they died. He learned about her fiance Hans, who abandoned her and her family for Aryanism, and married a Christian woman. He learned how Henny discovered which of her acquaintances had helped her family during the war, and who had turned their backs on them and joined the Nazi Party.
In keeping with Seth's style, the book is long and detailed, written with demanding precision, combing through entire lives, accompanied by reproductions of family photographs, documents and letters.
"Originally, I didn't expect to have such a wide corpus. I thought I'd write it as a small family history, mainly concentrating on my uncle," he says. "But when I saw my aunt's letters and began reading them in detail, then I realized this is more than a summary of my thoughts, it's more than my uncle's life and my aunt's life. It has also become a story of love and an unusual relationship. It opened up into history - India, England, Germany, Palestine, the diaspora in South Africa, China, California. In a sense it's a story of war and peace.
This is also the story of the 20th century.
"In a way. These are indicative lives. These lives probably couldn't have happened in any other century. Also, many of the -isms came out then - colonialism, Nazism, Communism, conservatism, racism, liberalism, all the -isms feed into the story in one way or another."
Little sympathy for Israel
Seth sits down in his bedroom to talk. The window overlooks the lawn and the gray sky. Throughout the conversation, he holds Henny's 19th-century High Holiday prayer book. He feels a great deal of sympathy for the Jewish story. In the book, he writes that he could not even read Heine any more after having read Nazi documents from that period, noting that his words stunk of Gestapo letters.
But as far as the Israeli story goes, his sympathy is far more limited. He is opposed to the idea of a sovereign Jewish state in Israel, and supports a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. In the book, he writes that Israel is based on the concept of Jewish control of the nation, and that had Israel's demographic policy been implemented by some other country, it would have been condemned as ethnic cleansing. Seth sees Israeli policy as being based on permanently distancing the Palestinians, some of whose families have lived in the region for generations, and who fled terror when the state was founded, as well as actively encouraging Jews around the world, regardless of their connection to Israel, to settle there.
Seth is severely critical of the justifications for the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. He discusses what he sees as the evils of the occupation, and accuses Israel of imposing an arbitrary reign of fear and injustice on the Palestinians.
"In the book, I speak very clearly about certain subjects, which I knew might upset some of my Jewish friends. But one has to speak very clearly. ... Eventually in the long run, I hope there is a solution even if I can't see how it can happen."
You tend not to connect the Holocaust with the Jewish people's need for an independent territory.
"It would be a bit unfair for me talk about something like that. Historically, there was a strong connection. Without the enormous sympathy felt for Jewish people after the Holocaust, it would have been difficult to get the support of the U.S., which was crucial at that time. But I think it would be difficult, generations down the line, to treat it as an acceptable reason for controlling another people. Palestinians were dispossessed not just during 1948, but afterward. One has to put oneself in other people's shoes.
"If I were a Jew and I had suffered so much, and were so insecure, than I'd go and fight for a home. On the other hand, if I were a Palestinian who had lived in his land for centuries, to be expelled from it because of other people trying to find a secure home - it's also a terrible tragedy. What can I say? There's no clear right and wrong in that matter. But there is no reason that a group of people have completely marshaled in the consciousness of the world that their suffering can't be compared to other people's suffering. This situation is not only wrong, it is very dangerous."
Seth is concerned about the reception of his book in Israel, just as he was concerned about its reception in Germany. There have been so many books written on the subject that he questions who needs another one, and one written by an Indian, at that. He says he hopes readers in Israel will not take it poorly, and will appreciate the fact that he has not tried to evade sensitive issues. When asked why he had to write about this, he says it is a kind of contemplation that grew out of the materials of the book, just like he has contemplated the history of Italy, Germany or England.
Crossing cultures
Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta in 1952. His father was in the shoe trade, and his mother was the first female judge in the Supreme Court. He studied economics at Oxford University and then at Stanford University in California. To write his doctoral thesis - on villages in China - he traveled to China and studied for two years at Nanjing University. Thus, in 1983 his first book, "Heaven Lake: Travels through Singkiang and Tibet," was born.
In 1986 Seth published "The Golden Gate," a narrative sonnet sequence inspired by Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" about five friends in San Francisco in the 1980s. But his breakthrough book, which established him as an internationally reknowned writer, was the thick novel "A Suitable Boy." This book is about four families in India in the mid-20th century. In 2000 he published another successful novel, "An Equal Music," about musicians in England.
In reply to the question of where he considers his spiritual home to be, Seth replies that it is a source of pride for him that he could have been born anywhere, and that he connects to various cultures - Chinese, Islamic, German and Jewish. However, he sees himself mostly as a Hindu. Fortunately, he says, India has a secular and open culture in which all citizens - Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists - are equal citizens. Up until about two months ago, he notes, India had a Muslim president, a Sikh prime minister and a Christian woman leading the largest political party. He adds that 35 different languages are spoken in India. It is not an easy place to live, but it is easier than it was in the past - it isn't easy for the Untouchable caste, but it easier for them than it used to be, he says.
In the book he writes that he would never have forgiven his mother had she not allowed him to go live in London.
When asked whether he has ever settled accounts with British colonialism, he says that he was born after India attained its independence and never experienced life in a country controlled by foreigners. He adds that the more you broaden your horizons and get to know more parts of the world, the more you understand how rich and complex the world is, and that where you live is not the whole world.
As for the fact that he has hardly written about his experience as an immigrant, Seth says that he does not write about immigrant experiences; his books set in California, Britain or India depict local characters. He says that he has experienced immigration, but was somewhat protected as a student at Oxford, a very tolerant university. His brother, who studied at Leicester University, had a worse experience, he says. Seth writes about families a lot, "Perhaps because I don't have a family of my own," he explains.
Is this by choice?
Seth replies that this is partially the case, but that he is close to his family. For better or worse, the family one receives at birth is one's world, he says. His parents' faces, he says, are those he sees in his imagination when he judges himself. When he is in Delhi, he lives in the family home. He has a house of his own, but he never lives there because, he says, at the family home he never needs to set lunch dates; he just finds his mother, his niece, his brother and his family who live on the floor above. When he writes, however, he needs solitude.
|
