The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden review – secrets and sex in postwar Europe

This remarkable debut novel explores the Netherlands’ failure to reckon with the fate of Dutch Jews alongside one woman’s reckoning with herself

Isabel, the protagonist of Yael van der Wouden’s remarkable debut novel, has an excruciating habit, at moments of tension or distress, of pinching and twisting the skin on the back of her hand until it is raw and red. The repeated gesture sums up her plight as a figure seething with resentments and desires that she keeps, rigidly and violently, in check. Isabel lives in the house in which she grew up and in which her mother died, in a small Netherlandish town 15 years after the end of the second world war, obsessively cleaning and polishing the tableware and other objects that her mother loved while ruling tyrannically over the meek local girl who is her maid. When her debonair and womanising brother – who has been promised the house as his inheritance, making Isabel’s residence there tenuous and time-limited – leaves the country for several weeks, he brings his new girlfriend, the vivacious and flamboyant Eva, to live with Isabel, threatening to loosen or to sever the tight coils into which she has wound her existence.

The stakes of Van der Wouden’s taut family drama slowly rise as it becomes clear that Isabel’s struggles to reckon with or move on from her mother’s death, and to find a way of being in the present, are a mirror and a symptom of a wider failure in the postwar Netherlands to reckon with and atone for the fate of Dutch Jews, offered up to the Nazis with little resistance, the gaps and the homes that they left behind seamlessly occupied and rarely relinquished to the few who returned. Van der Wouden’s superb earlier essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, explored the ways in which that totemic, sentimentalised figure threatened to leave little space for her own explorations of her Dutch-Jewish identity; here she explores not the deportations and the mass murders but the quieter forgettings and self-justifications that came in their aftermath. “If they cared about it, they would have come back for it,” says one character of a Jewish family robbed of their home. “No. They’re gone. They’re gone or they don’t care. So many are gone.” Beneath such platitudes guilt lies buried.

Continue reading…

Please follow and like us: