“A House in Lahore: Growing Up Jewish in Pakistan” by Selzer Kahan

55 Lawrence Road, Lahore (via Hazel Kahan's blog)

When Hazel Selzer Kahan’s parents left their homes in Germany and Poland in the early 1930s to study medicine in Rome, they envisioned spending the rest of their lives helping patients in Europe. But as Fascist governments deepened their hold in both Germany and Italy during their medical studies, Hermann and Kate Selzer did not see a future as Jewish doctors in Europe, at least for the time being. Hermann sailed to India, thinking it would be safe to live under the British. In 1937, he traveled from city to city in India, looking for a hospital that would take in a couple of Jewish doctors. When he finally reached Lahore, he found acceptance. Kate joined him six months later and a couple years after that Selzer Kahan would be born, followed by her brother Michael two years later.

While there are certainly growing numbers of books about Jews who fled Europe for Shanghai before and during World War II, Selzer Kahan’s A House in Lahore: Growing Up Jewish in Pakistan, is remarkable because of its setting: it’s a fascinating story of a Jewish family that lived in what became Pakistan and stayed until the 1970s.

Selzer Kahan spent her early years at the Purandhar Internment Camp in Western India because she, her brother, and parents were deemed enemy-aliens, even though these enemy states were the very places from which her parents escaped and were now stateless. The British separated people in the camp, so Jews and others who were against the Nazis were placed in one area and German and Italian fascists in another area. After a couple of years at Purandhar, the family was transferred to the nearby Satara internment camp, which had previously been used to intern Boers from South Africa. The Selzers stayed at Satara for the next three and a half years.

 

In Purandhar, my mum and dad had to worry about us hurting ourselves on the steep, rough mountainside, but Satara was on mostly level ground, and there I was free to wander wherever I wanted, as far as the barbed wire where the guards would prevent us from going any farther. But in both camps, my parents were always close by and so was everything else. In the camps, while we were still young children, our family was together every day and every night.

 

They would separate after the war when Selzer Kahan was eight years old. Her parents sent Michael and her off to boarding school in Mussoorie, India. Hermann and Kate were happy their children were learning Urdu, but wanted them to speak English with a proper accent and thought that could only happen at a boarding school.

 

A House in Lahore: Growing up Jewish in Pakistan, Hazel Selzer Kahan (October 2022)
A House in Lahore: Growing up Jewish in Pakistan, Hazel Selzer Kahan (October 2022)

The family was away for the summer in Srinagar—where Hermann and Kate practiced medicine in cooler temperatures—when fighting broke out just after Partition. The family would move into a house at 55 Lawrence Road in Lahore, in an ironic twist, after a Hindu family vacated it when they fled Lahore for India—much as the Selzers had left Europe.

 

Our house was built of dark-red brick, with arches shaped like mosque windows and purple and pink bougainvillea tumbling from the roof over each of its corners. A low wall of lacy brickwork surrounded the flat roof, which was held up by columns made of wavy brick.

 

The house was more of a sprawling villa and was staffed by a number of different servants, but Selzer Kahan writes that some things were better said when the family was alone. Since Kate and Hermann’s close relatives left Europe just before World War II for what would become Israel, the family often talked about them in conversation but had to be careful not to mention the word, Israel, because they were afraid of their Muslim servants’ thoughts on the Jewish state due to the animosity between the two countries. Instead they would use words like “Eretz”, the Hebrew word for land, if servants were around. Years later, Selzer Kahan realized the servants knew exactly what they were talking about, but they never gave the Selzers any trouble about their Judaism or anything else.

Selzer Kahan spends the first half of her book writing about being Jewish in Pakistan, and later in England when she and Michael are sent to boarding school there. Their parents stayed in Pakistan until 1971, when they moved to Israel. The second half deals with Selzer Kahan’s estrangement from Michael due to opposing political views—both American and Israeli—and her returns to Pakistan decades after she left. Just before the pandemic broke out, she had been traveling to Lahore almost on a yearly basis and visited her family’s old house at 55 Lawrence Road. Now in her mid-80s, she doesn’t know if she will ever see her home city again.

 

I want to see Lahore again but I’m afraid of what won’t be there. I don’t want to walk down that small road between the two nursery gardens and find out that the Sikh shrine will no longer be there under the banyan tree behind the wall on the left. I most definitely do not want to discover that something new and gray and nasty may have been built on the grounds where our brownish-red brick house used to be.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.