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November 13, 2024 in Library Corner
By Robin Jacobson.
The shadow of the past hovers over the present in the remarkable debut novel, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, shortlisted for the 2024 prestigious Booker Prize.
The Safekeep opens in the Netherlands in 1961. World War II, with all its horrors, is in the recent past. However, for Louis, Isabel, and Hendrik den Brave – Dutch siblings in their late twenties and early thirties who were children during the war – the war years feel distant. They retain only hazy memories of scary times.
In the early years of the war, the siblings and their widowed mother lived in Amsterdam. During the “Hunger Winter” of 1944, when famine stalked the western Netherlands, their uncle Karel was able to move the family east to the Dutch countryside. He bought them a large, lovely house where the children grew up. In time, the brothers moved away from home and established careers – Louis as an engineer and Hendrik as an accountant. But Isabel remained with her mother, tending to her when she became ill. After her mother died, Isabel continued to live alone in the family home.
Isabel’s life is quiet and orderly. She oversees the house and possessions that her mother cherished, caring for them with the help of a maid, Neelke. A strict taskmaster, Isabel watches Neelke closely, ever on guard against slipshod work and petty theft.
Isabel particularly prizes her mother’s favorite china set, decorated with images of hares. Ever so fastidiously, she washes the china regularly and then returns it to a locked glass display cabinet. When Hendrik urges her to use the plates, she tells him that they are not “for touching,” but “for keeping.”
Despite Isabel’s residence in the house and assiduous care of it, Isabel has no ownership rights in the house. By longstanding arrangement, Uncle Karel intends to bequeath the house to the eldest sibling, Louis. Because Louis is the future owner of the house, Isabel feels unable to refuse him when he asks her to allow his latest girlfriend, Eva, to stay with Isabel for a month while Louis is away on a business trip.
Eva is a chatty, flamboyant, bleached blonde with messy habits who couldn’t be more different from the terse, tense, proper Isabel. Isabel immediately disapproves of her. To say anything more about the characters or plot of this novel would spoil it.
The book provokes profound and intriguing questions. What makes a home? Why do we become so attached to certain objects? What draws us to love one person rather than another? Why might we both love our siblings and resent them? What governmental sins are citizens complicit in? Is historical reckoning possible?
Born in 1987 in Israel, Yael van der Wouden moved with her parents (Israeli mother and Dutch father) and sisters to the Netherlands at age 10. She first gained literary renown with a 2017 essay, “On (Not) Reading Anne Frank,” about being Jewish in the Netherlands.
In her essay, van der Wouden wrote that in Tel Aviv, she never thought about being Jewish. But in the Netherlands, classmates called her “Anne Frank” and scratched a swastika on her locker. When Anne Frank was discussed in history class, the Dutch people were portrayed as heroes who hid Anne Frank and her family from the German Nazis. There was no mention of Dutch collaboration or complicity in what happened to their Jewish neighbors. This issue resurfaces with chilling effect in The Safekeep.
