Fleeing Germany in 1933 and Italy in 1937, two 27-year-old Jewish physicians seek a new future in British India. In 1940, now a family of four, they are arrested and interned by the British as “enemy aliens” until their release in 1946. The children are sent to boarding schools while their parents build a medical practice in what has become Pakistan. Following regime change, Jews are no longer welcome and in 1971, the family leaves Lahore forever. This memoir describes the contradictions and dilemmas of growing up Jewish in internment and post-British Raj Muslim Pakistan, shuffling identities while learning the futility of belonging and the negotiable meaning of home. Drawing on extensive boarding school correspondence, the book unflinchingly examines the power of letter writing to bind a scat-tered family but also its inability to prevent schisms. Her father’s death releases in the author a compulsion to discover whether her beloved childhood house still stands. Forty years after leaving “forever,” she returns to the town of her birth, unsure whether welcome or rejection await but unprepared for what she finds!

Born in Lahore in 1939 when it was part of the British Raj to two Jewish refugee physicians fleeing Hitler's Europe, Hazel Selzer Kahan and her family spent the years between 1940 and 1946 in British internment camps in India. In 1947, Lahore became part of Pakistan. Hazel was educated at boarding schools in India and England, completed her undergraduate degree at University College London and her Ph.D. in Psychology at the Australian National University. She lived in Australia and Israel before coming to the United States and pursuing a market research career in New York. She now lives among the woods and vineyards of the North Fork of Long Island where she is a writer, the creator of leafages art and the host of two monthly radio interview programs on WPKN radio.