In “Two Lives,” Indian novelist Vikram Seth has written a moving and unusual biography of his Uncle Shanti and Shanti’s German-born wife, Henny, two ordinary people who survived the extraordinary horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. Seth has created an intricate portrait of a marriage, two individuals and the bonds of family.
Weaving together his own experiences living with Shanti and Henny in London in the 1970s with interviews he conducted with Shanti before his death in 1998 and a trunkful of documents and photographs that Henny left behind, Seth has reconstructed a flawed but supportive marriage in the aftermath of war and genocide.
Both Shanti and Henny were born in 1908 and met in 1931 when Shanti came to Berlin from India to study dentistry. Henny Caro came from an assimilated and cultured German-Jewish family. Shanti rented a room from the Caros.
Shanti’s arrival in Germany coincided with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Caros and the Jews of Germany were progressively harassed, brutalized and stripped of their human rights and property. Henny left Germany for England in 1939, but her mother, sister and most of her friends were not so lucky: They were slaughtered in the Nazi death factories of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
Meanwhile, Shanti joined the British Army as a dental surgeon, saw combat in North Africa and lost his right arm at the brutal battle of Monte Cassino in Italy in 1943.
Using the evocative prose that drove his epic novel, “A Suitable Boy,” Seth develops the unlikely couple into flesh-and-blood characters. The short, generous Shanti is a contrast to the tall, uptight Henny. It is the use of Henny’s letters and personal documents that makes this biography truly exceptional. When she died nine years before Shanti in 1989, he destroyed all her photos and papers, but forgot about Henny’s trunk in the attic, which contained personal effects from a happier pre-Hitler Germany and postwar letters from her German friends.
Henny’s personal effects reveal a woman of complexity and nuance whom Seth did not know in life. The prewar letters show the brave efforts by the Caros and their Jewish friends to maintain their dignity and humanity in the face of the Nazis. Henny also reveals her grief when she confirmed that her mother and sister were murdered.
Where Henny shines as a moral person is the postwar letters. She responds to her surviving German friends with care packages from her own meager rations in London. Through extensive letters, she also tries to determine which friends helped and which friends shunned her mother and sister as the Nazis tightened their genocidal noose. One chilling letter from Lili, a close friend of Henny’s who became a Nazi sympathizer, is full of aggressive rationalizations for her actions.
Henny’s letters shed light on her marriage to Shanti in England in 1951. It is not a marriage of passionate love, but a nurturing partnership. For Henny, Shanti represents the idyllic days before the Nazis. Henny also makes it clear that she has repressed any discussion of her mother and sister because she did not want to upset him.
Seth’s depiction of Shanti’s wartime service is riveting. Shanti’s pencil-scrawled love letter to Henny days after he lost his arm is a heartbreaking profile in courage. After the war, he had a successful career as a one-armed dentist.
At points, though, the extensive use of Henny’s German letters take on a repetitious quality. Seth reproduces many letters, some very dull, and even the bad poetry of Henny’s German ex-fiancé in their entirety. Judicious editorial cutting would have helped the flow of the book.
At the end of “Two Lives,” Shanti’s bonds with Seth and their extended Indian family come to the forefront. As he nears death, the normally kind Shanti unleashes rage at his relatives and indulges in a final, unexpected act of betrayal of his family.
In “Two Lives,” Seth succeeds in pulling down the stoic facade of Shanti and Henny’s middle-class English lives, revealing their inner hopes and feelings. By writing about his aunt and uncle in the context of the most turbulent events of the 20th century, Seth turns biography into powerful literature, distilling the universal human emotions of passion, grief and the will to survive.
Dylan Foley is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Two Lives
By Vikram Seth
HarperCollins, 512 pages, $27.95
