On Tagore's trail: How a Jewish backpacker found Shanti in India

India is a favourite destination for Israeli tourists but few know that it was a young, single Jewish backpacker who blazed the trail back in 1922. Awe-struck by Rabindranath Tagore after a chance meeting in New York, a young teacher named Schlomith Flaum set sail from Palestine for Bombay. She then made her way to Santiniketan. Schlomith would become Shanti, and spend the next two years teaching German to Indian students while they taught her a smattering of Bengali and Sanskrit.

Flaum, who went on to become an informal ambassador for India after her return to Israel, has remained largely forgotten. Now, the story of this intrepid Lithuanian-born woman has come alive in a book by Israeli author Shimon Lev. The book ‘From Lithuania to Santiniketan’ has excerpts from Flaum’s writings on Tagore and India translated into English, as well as the letters she exchanged with Tagore. Some of these letters were discovered by Lev in Rabindra Bhawan and have not been published before.

But it is her nostalgic and lyrical memories of Tagore and Santiniketan that transport the reader to the days when Visva Bharati was taking its first steps as an academic institution. At Santiniketan, she writes, “you feel the heartbeat of Bengal, the land of poetry and imagination.”


Her connection to Gurudev continued even after she returned home. She exchanged letters with Tagore and met him again in Berlin in 1930. In 1946, she published a biography of Tagore in Hebrew. “Flaum’s life can literally be divided into two periods — after and before Tagore. You could say that she found her Asian identity under the mango trees in Santiniketan,” says Lev, a renowned India scholar who has authored books on Gandhi. Interestingly, the Mahatma was another memorable encounter for Flaum.

The current Lithuanian ambassador to New Delhi, Laimonas Talat-Kelpsa, who was instrumental in the book becoming a reality, feels it fits in with the new trend of personalised history. “Earlier, scholars tried to analyse history through landmark events and theories but the new trend is towards a more individualistic history. This book is a wonderful opportunity to see the India of that time through Flaum’s eyes,” he says.