Sunday, February 06, 2011

Ever Heard of the Jews of Mauritius?

From a book review of a new novel, Nathacha Appanah’s “The Last Brother”:-


Milosz wrote extensively of postwar guilt, of bearing witness, of being left standing amid ruins, surrounded by the graves of people unsaved and unclaimed. So too does Appanah, a French-Mauritian writer of Indian origin...Inspired by the largely unknown story of 1,500 Jews who fled Europe only to be imprisoned in Mauritius from 1940 to 1945 after their ship was refused entry into Palestine (then under British rule), the novel recounts the heartfelt friendship between two boys: David, a Czech orphan, and Raj, an Indian-Mauritian grieving for the two brothers he lost in a flash flood.

Told from the point of view of Raj as a 70-year-old man, the book amounts to a eulogy — a memorial to David and the 127 Jews who did not survive prison; to Raj’s brothers, Anil and Vinod, who vanished in a single afternoon; and, perhaps most of all, to childhood and its inevitable passing.

...Hospitalized some time later in the prison infirmary after sustaining injuries from his father’s drunken beatings, Raj — still unaware of the war and the plight of the Jews — strikes up a friendship with David, who is suffering from malaria. In a stark exchange spoken in tentative French, which is neither boy’s mother tongue, the two reveal their grief in the plainest terms: “I’m all alone.” And the reply, “Me too.”

...Instead of attaining actual, physical escape, the characters turn to language to transcend their plights and their selves. At night, David and the other hospitalized Jews sing in Yiddish, “like a secret they were sharing that linked them from note to note, from refrain to refrain.” Later, when a dying David sings in the forest, Raj feels as though “this lament spoke of the beauty of life itself.” (It is worth noting that King David, believed to be the author of most of the psalms, was called “the sweet singer of Israel.”) Similarly, Raj’s mother has her own secret language, through nature: “Touched by her fingers, every plant found its destined purpose: healing, protecting, soothing, sometimes killing.”

An excerpt.

P.S.

From here:

Now based in Paris, Nathacha Appanah grew up in Mauritius. On that island, between December 1940 and July 1945, more than 1,500 Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe by sea were interned by the British authorities after they had been turned away from Palestine.

The Last Brother touches on this history sketchily, and partially. We don't hear, for instance, that 200 detainees chose to join the Allied forces.

About those refugees.
^

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