The embassies of Israel and Lithuania will launch a new book on Lithuanian-Jewish female traveller Schlomith Flaum and her encounters with Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi and other leading personalities of early 20th-century India.
The book launches are scheduled at the C. D. Deshmukh Auditorium of the India International Centre, New Delhi, March 19, and the Abanindranath Tagore Gallery, ICCR, Kolkata on March 20.
Schlomith Frieda Flaum was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, on March 18, 1893, and died in Israel on January 2, 1963, at the age of seventy.
She travelled extensively. As an educator and kindergarten teacher, she mainly sought out new methods of teaching. That interest brought her to the Visva Bharati College in Santiniketan just a few months after it opened.
During her two years in Santiniketan, from 1922 to 1924, Flaum met leading figures of India’s independence movement including Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu and Annie Bessant.
Of all the people she met, it was the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore who most affected her. She recounted years later that she found herself so deeply involved in Tagore’s world of creativity and intellectual thinking that she “reached the state of mind Indians describe as a state of permanent ecstasy.”
The two years in Santiniketan made Flaum the informal ambassador of Tagore, Santiniketan and for all matters related to India. Her numerous accounts and publications about Tagore, Gandhi and India were published as two books and more than twenty articles.
Most were published in Hebrew and were unknown outside Israel.
Israeli scholar Dr. Shimon Lev approached the Lithuanian embassy in 2016 with the idea to translate and publish Flaum’s diaries in English.
Dr. Lev had already produced a book, “Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach,” dealing with the various aspects of the unique relationship between Gandhi and his closest associate during his South African period, a Lithuania-born Jewish architect Hermann Kallenbach. The book was published in India by Orient Blackswan in 2012.
It took more than a year to raise funds and complete the translation and editing of the new book on Flaum and Tagore. The Goodwill Foundation, a Lithuania-based non-profit organization engaged in preservation of the Jewish-Lithuanian heritage around the world, stepped in as one of the co-sponsors.
The book “From Lithuania to Santiniketan” consists of three parts: the introduction written by Dr. Lev, the excerpts from Flaum’s original texts about Tagore and India translated into English, and the copies of the letters exchanged between Flaum and Tagore from 1922 to 1940. Some of these letters have been discovered by Dr. Lev in the Rabindra Bhawan in Santiniketan and have not been published before.
Flaum’s unique accounts of her childhood in Lithuania have been incorporated in the new book and provide a very intimate perspective on the daily life of the Jews in the early 20th century Europe.
Flaum’s Zionist leanings and her efforts to win support among Indian intellectuals for the cause of Israeli independence also feature prominently in the book.
It is her nostalgic and lyric memories of Tagore and Santiniketan, cast in a rusty and archaic language, which constitute the most interesting passage. They take the reader back to the days when the Visva Bharati College was taking its first steps as an academic institution, when India was brimming with ideas of transformation and the West was rediscovering Asia with India at its navel.
This first-ever publication of Flaum’s works in English will hopefully serve the purpose of restoring her forgotten name to the pantheon of eminent personalities who were part of Tagore’s circle and contributed to Santiniketan’s legacy.
The release of the book in New Delhi and Kolkata will be attended by the author, Dr. Shimon Lev; Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community; and leading experts on Tagore such as professor Radha Chakravarty (New Delhi) and professor Uma Das Gupta (Kolkata). The ambassadors of Israel and Lithuania will grace both the occasions with their presence.
The book launch in New Delhi is at 6:30 P.M. on March 19 at the C. D. Deshmukh Auditorium of the India International Centre, and in Kolkata at 5:00 P.M. on March 20 at the Rabindranath Tagore Gallery of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.
The book will also be released in Israel and Lithuania later this year.
Contacts for further detail:
Ms. Rasa Nayyar, rasa.nayyar@urm.lt (Embassy of Lithuania)
Ms. Reuma Mantzur, culture@newdelhi.mfa.gov.il (Embassy of Israel)
Information provided by the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry here.