Kenneth Bonert Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Kenneth Bonert

Kenneth Bonert talks about The Lion Seeker, his first novel about a Jewish emigrant family who settle in South Africa before the Second World War.

Tell us about your book, The Lion Seeker.

It's a big, sweeping novel about a Jewish emigrant family who settle in South Africa before the Second World War. The main character is the son, Isaac Helger, who is desperate to fight his way out of poverty and into respected manhood. His mother is just as desperate to get her relatives out of Lithuania as the war looms closer. The two drives eventually intersect in a grueling crisis for Isaac. There's love, hate, secrets, violence, ambition — I tried not to pull any punches.

The best compliment I've received is that the book feels like the true reality of South Africa, even though it's set in the 1930s. I think that's because life in South Africa is so intense, with highs of unbelievable kindness and caring, and lows of the utmost depravity. A country of emotional extremes as well as economical. If I've done my job, the reader should feel that intensity with this book.

How did you get into Isaac's head while writing? What are some of his strengths and weaknesses?

It's all about finding the right voice, the right language. I struggled for a long time, but once I started to use the present tense for Isaac, he launched off the page and became real for me. He's a raw, tough, driven, no-BS kind of character but that's mixed with naivety, sentimentality, passion. I think what makes him real is how he blunders through life, often being his own worst enemy, but also how piercingly he suffers regrets and tries to right himself.

You grew up in South Africa. What's your personal connection to this story?

I grew up with my grandmother living in the house with us in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, a woman born in 1901, who spoke little English and had emigrated from Dusat, Lithuania, the same village I describe in the book. The direct inspiration for Lion Seeker came, I think, from seeing an old photograph of my late uncle with his arm around a very young Nadine Gordimer (the Jewish community being a small one, he had known the Gordimer sisters growing up). The image of my uncle with the famous writer made me wonder why it was I had never seen a man like him, a type like him, reflected in literature. My uncle had been a panel beater in his youth and later built up a large scrap metal and auto parts company that is still in existence in Johannesburg today. My imagination was sparked, and as I researched the history of my grandmother's village and reflected on the lives of men like my late uncle, the story and characters slowly came alive.

The South African Jewish experience isn't one that's been represented in fiction as often as other areas of the Diaspora. Why do you think that is? And what did you want to share with readers about this experience?

A good observation. I think the struggle against apartheid eclipsed other literary possibilities for a long time. With apartheid buried, there's some new cultural space for other South African stories to come out. Some writers worry there's nothing compelling to write about in South Africa compared to the black/white drama of apartheid. I see it the other way, that now we have tremendous freedom to interpret and explore the South African experience without politics impinging on the work the way it used to. That includes going back and taking fresh slants on old history, re-examining neglected threads. To put it another way: there used to be only one story worth telling in South Africa; now there are a multitude.

The Jewish presence was a big part of white South African life, comprised of an extremely cohesive and highly organized community. I wanted to show these people in literature for the first time and I wanted to begin with their origins in Lithuania, with the first generation. It's rich territory for a novelist to explore because of the moral complexities involved, i.e., Jews being an oppressed people and settling in Africa where whites oppress blacks, yet still feeling precariously vulnerable to anti-Semitism. So I wanted to use that era to create a compelling drama and to capture authentically Jewish South African characters in fiction in an original way. That meant capturing their voices, their slang, in a way that was accessible to outsiders yet still authentic. I wanted to bring into literature a new kind of Jewish character: tough African Jews with their own unique style of doing things.

You've also worked as a journalist and published short fiction. How did your previous writing experience bear on writing the novel? Did you find the process very different from your other work?

A novel is a very different animal from either of those forms. One thing journalism can give you is a nose for a story. It always comes down to the human factor. Information about, say, budget cuts is just numbers, boring; but if you can find the person who is hurting because of those cuts and show the connection, you can uncover a readable, interesting story. I think that's an unwavering truth about all stories, whether fiction or non — we don't write stories for computers to read, we write for other humans with the same hearts and brains. At the same time, journalism also gave me an obsession with checking facts, getting it right, maybe too much so for fiction, but that is still good to have in later drafts when you're trying to get the authentic details correct, not so much in the beginning when you're letting your imagination go. You don't need to be fact-oriented then, that will only hinder you.

With a novel, the story is constructed out of imagination. Since the imagination lies deep inside, in the same place where dreams come from, it's an inward investigation. With journalism, it's the opposite, going out into world with the notebook and getting the quotes. But the interesting similarity is that the more you learn about the story — the more sources you talk to in journalism, and the more drafts you do in fiction — the clearer the picture becomes and the more your confidence grows. This confidence reflects in the writing, I think. The key is to persist till you know what you're doing.

What are you working on now?

Another novel and a story collection. To be honest, I have more ideas for projects than I know what to do with. The discipline is to stay with one thing till the end. I think it was Philip Roth who said that the road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

The majority of this interview was sourced from OpenBookToronto.com and is reproduced with permission of the publisher Houghton Mifflin Books

Click to read:
"Kenneth Bonert: Balancing Insight, Poetry and a Ripping Good Story"

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.