Sep 11, 2009 01:05 AM
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(Updated Sep 11, 2009 01:10 AM)
A Winter Word
Cold cold friend, Frost-
Night comes, and I
Am dispossessed.
Most cold, cold
Is this night;
And my youth old,
My spirit lost.
I cannot rest.
I walk alone.
Frost, burn upon
My every bone.
The cold of the seasons, or the cold of life, old age? Is this how one feels when in the winter of your life, you are left all alone, your children settled, your partner gone? For sure, this is how Shanti Seth must have felt, when Henny died. Shanti and Henny were Vikram Seth's great uncle and aunt, who took him in as a teenager, when he went to London for schooling, and where he stayed off and on with the Indo-German couple. When Seth began reconstructing their story, he did so with little sense of where it might lead. By then Henny was dead and Shanti, 85 and in poor health, needed the distraction. In the event, as he sat down, laptop at the ready, to conduct his interviews, it was Seth who was stimulated - and made to grasp how many events and intellectual currents of the 20th century intersected with the lives of Shanti and Henny.
A trained physicist, Shanti made his way to Europe in 1931 to study dentistry, ending up a penniless student in Berlin, stranded in a country whose language he could not speak. He rented a room with Ella Caro in the Charlottenburg district and quickly warmed to her family's young circle. "Nimm den Schwarzen nicht" [don't take the black man] had been the younger daughter Hennerle's(Henny) first reaction to her mother's lodger, an ironical prejudice, given the imminent rise of the Third Reich. But they were not to know that there would develop a relationship between them that would last more than five decades, and survive Holocaust and second Wrold War.
At one point in the novel, Henny's story takes center stage, thanks to a bunch of letters Seth discovered after her death. And herein lies one of the most fascinating sections of the book. Henny's family was Jewish. In the happy days when Shanti shared their Berlin home, they(Henny's mother Ella, sister Lola, and brother Heinz) enjoyed a comfortable middle-class existence. But as Hitler's power rose their lives were gradually crushed. Henny and her brother finally fled, she to England and he to South America. But Lola remained in Berlin with their mother. It was only after the war, through her friends' letters, that Henny learned that both had perished in concentration camps. But there was more, which I am not going to divulge here.
"Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star . riches are to be found." Says Seth, and riches are indeed there to be discovered in the story that Seth offers up. More than once, Seth worries that he has betrayed them, by making their private lives public; she especially might have disapproved. But his motives are generous, and the breadth of the canvas is ample justification.
In the hands of a lesser writer, the story might have seemed little more than interesting. Seth, with his beautifully simple prose(am I repeating myself?), creates an unforgettable portrait. He writes about intricate, tiny day to day details, then broadens our horizons to include Nazi Germany. The book also delves into thoughts about love, courage and friendship, betrayal through opportunism and moral cowardice, and those acts of spontaneous generosity which are all that is left to maintain faith in humanity. Another positive was the level of involvement Seth had in the narration. He might have started the biography as a project to occupy his great uncle's time and attention, but soon it turned into a catharsis for him as well, not to mention that he found a subject to write about post A Suitable Boy. In fact, the first 50 odd pages are almost autobiographical, so much so that the book might have been titled Three Lives. You are strangely moved when he says how he was unable to read or sing in German post his research about Holocaust victims, and how, subsequently, reading Henny's letters depicting the gossip of day to day lives about her friends healed him. But where the biography scores, for me at least, is when Seth depicts the research, the process of writing a biography, which, however effortless it seems, is not. The interviews, endless reading, research to find what happened to Lola and Ella is fascinating, and makes the reader involved with the book, more than it would have, had it been a dispassionate narrative.
Henny and Shanti married too late to for children. What they had was an author for a great-nephew, an almost son. And he, through Two Lives, has ensured that their lives do not fade into obscurity.
