Kenneth Bonert: Bonert

South Africa Dept: The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert, a young Toronto writer, adds to the unique diversity in Canadian literature. Not only do we now have books written by Canadians of Chinese, Indian, and Jewish origin, Bonert offers a sense of the Jewish movement in the early 20th century from the shtels of Europe to the seemingly greater freedoms of South Africa, according to The Star. The truth is that, like black Africans, Jews are the other, not quite equal. Jews in the South African capital mostly live in the suburb of Doornfontein and rank little higher than the Xhosa and Bantu communities but well below the Boers and English and at over 500 pages, this book is only half as long as Tolstoy s War and Peace , but it is an epic, a vast story about a rarefied subject: the community of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated to South Africa before World War II. Bonert s story of the Helger family, focusing on Isaac and his mother Gitelle in the years before World War II, shows Jews transferring their culture and language from places such as Lithuania to the racist and ethnically circumscribed city of Johannesburg. Bonert sprinkles Yiddish throughout the book. Zog mir der richtike emes, Gitelle says to her son Isaac. Tell me the real truth. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.