KARMA AND KISMET

A spiritual journey sends an author through three continents in search of inner peace and acceptance after a turbulent childhood and adolescence.

Shandler (born Louie Schitz) was born in in 1946 in Cape Town, South Africa, to Jewish immigrants who fled the Nazis and met in Israel before it declared statehood. His father, he writes, was a man of quick temper who was unpredictably violent. Young Shandler learned to be vigilant: “Any miscalculation might awaken Dad’s wrath.” At age 10, his father enrolled him in the South African College School, where he was to receive “the best English South African education.” A top student in his first school, he struggled academically at SACS, a rigid, all-boys institution that meted out punishment by caning. Still, he garnered respect in sports. However, in his first high school term, he failed Latin, and at 13, he was sent to a boarding school in Oudtshoorn, a barren area hundreds of miles from home, where he was subjected to antisemitic bullying. In 1967, Shandler volunteered to work in Israel after the Six Day War; during six months on a kibbutz, he absorbed the spirit of communal life, which influenced the following decade of his life. Next stop: Vancouver, Canada, and immersion in the hippie movement. Shandler is a skillful writer who bring readers directly into his experiences as a young man searching for a sense of belonging. At one point, he vividly writes of his first psychedelic trip in 1968: “The Mescaline journey…has blasted me into a profound new awareness of inner space, of being, of potential for healing, of psychological and spiritual growth.” He’s also a meticulous chronicler of the times and places in which he lived, from South Africa under apartheid to an ashram in Canada where he studied yogic teachings. Shandler paints a detailed portrait of his pain due to his father’s rejection, his fear and anger when he faced antisemitism, his disappointment with the political wranglings in yogic factions, and finding his path to psychological peace and financial success.

A thoughtful, emotionally forthright, and often engaging retrospective.