Nissim Ezekiel’s biography has a familiar feel to it. He returned to his native city after a sojourn in the metropolis, bound to his city by complex ties: work, loves, family, and intimate knowledge of a culture to which he would always be to some degree an outsider. He was the son of a modestly bourgeois Jewish family, a generation or two removed from the traditions of rural village life; a young writer living on the margins of a great European empire in dissolution; a young writer living on the margins of a great
Berlin? Prague? The empire was British, and its declining moment came decades later for Ezekiel, the most famous Jewish poet to be raised speaking Marathi, a language of Western India. The pilgrimage took place at the close of World War II to London’s Birkbeck College, and the poet’s home was always, immutably, Bombay. In “Background, Casually” (1965), he wrote in English of his return to Bombay:
Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/indias-most-famous-jewish-poet
