Most of the story is about Dinah’s family, one of the affluent Jewish families of Calcutta, but there’s also a poorer Jewish community living and working in Cochin. I’ve read and enjoyed other fiction about sub-cultures in India, for example Murder in Old Bombay and The Widows of Malabar Hill, and there’s a fascinating look at the Indian Jewish communities in Flowers In The Blood. There’s an expat-ish feeling as they have kosher foods prepared and set up Jewish education in another country, and of course, everyone in the community knows everyone else. The novel almost feels like an expat story, although the Sassoon families and other Jewish families had been in Calcutta for generations, their insular life felt a bit like my time in expat enclaves. Dinah Sassoon is the privileged daughter of prosperous opium traders, but this is offset by the family secrets and tragedies. It’s a historical family saga, set in the Jewish community in India.
(Yes, of course, that part of our history is important, but that’s not what I want to read about in these endless months of covid semi-quar.)Īnd Flowers in the Blood hits almost everything I like in fiction. I think I found Gay Courter’s Flowers in the Blood on Kveller’s list of historical fiction, as part of my search for more Jewish fiction that’s not about the Holocaust.
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