Jael Silliman, an Indian Jewish writer, has a dazzling collection of epic fiction, moving memoirs, and cultural histories.
Jael Silliman, an Indian Jewish writer, is a scholar, academic, activist, novelist, anthropologist, and archivist. (Perhaps a few more than Morris, the title character of her odd debut novel, The Man with Many Hats.) While her latest novel, The Teak Almirah, prompted us to speak with her, we quickly found ourselves happily drifting at the intersection of history and memory, until we came to the subject of books, at which point Silliman provided us with a glittering list to take home.
The Calcutta Jews
Silliman grew up in 1960s Calcutta, when the city’s close-knit and vibrant Jewish community, nearly entirely made up of Baghdadi Jews, had already fled – or were about to leave. The Jewish Girls’ School was no longer exclusively for Jewish girls (Silliman attended Loreto House rather than Jewish Girls’ School, as her mother and grandmother had done), and the oldest synagogue, the Neveh Shalome on Canning Street, where Silliman’s family worshipped, was no longer packed on festival days.
