The Safekeep
The Safekeep: a new voice articulates Jewish pain – a book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
It’s the 1960s in the Netherlands, only 15 years after the end of the war. People have bandaged their wounds, papered over the cracks in their stories, and got on with their lives.
It takes a courageous writer to lift the scabs, revive unsettling memories and challenge the complacency and conscience of those now comfortably settled in properties with unseen histories and phantom owners.
A new voice has emerged in Holland to shatter the silence and the revisionist history that conveniently cloaks Jewish war-time trauma in Europe. Yael van der Wouden, a young writer born in Tel Aviv of a Jewish mother and a Dutch father, doesn’t stop there. Interwoven with this major theme of her debut novel, The Safekeep—shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024—are significant subsidiary themes, such as the ongoing stigma that tarnishes the lives of gay men and women hiding from the censorious public gaze that condemns and criminalises. In heated and skillfully crafted sexual scenes that might conceivably upset sensitive readers, she launches an attack on sexual repression that warps the mind and nature of Isabel, one of four major characters in the book. Readers averse to erotic displays might prefer to avoid these encounters, mostly documented in chapter ten. However, these explicit scenes are never gratuitous and are integral to character development and narrative.
For me, part three of the novel, which completely subverts the narrative, secures the book’s place as a credible testament to the past by an author who ventures bravely into contested territory and succeeds in challenging revisionist ideas. These lies, embraced by so many after the Second World War, mask the iniquities of Dutch collaboration and the blatant rejection or avoidance of Holocaust survivors returning to claim and re-possess their previous homes, and then so cruelly experiencing threats and rejections from their heartless occupants.
In this final part of the novel, Van der Wouden employs a literary device that amplifies her authorial purpose superbly. Perhaps this section best encapsulates and expresses her bi-cultural heritage, both Dutch and Jewish/Israeli. Here, directly and transparently, she confronts the unmitigated evils of the past’s brutal and ruthless ethnic cleansing and the contemporary pain of dispossession. She gives a face and a voice to the suffering of Holocaust survivors. Those dispatched to their deaths were neighbours, doctors, lawyers, tradespeople and schoolchildren. They were, or thought they were, Netherlanders.
Van der Wouden is an astute storyteller, attuned to modernity and its narrative forms. She steps with artistry, flair and confidence into dangerous ideological territory, prodding the sleeping serpent of Nazi collaboration with its attendant post-war apologists and revisionist historians, who believed they had wiped the slate clean and exorcised the Jewish ghosts. But they hadn’t reckoned with an author imbued with fresh vision, able to tear aside the veil obscuring the ineradicable truths that devastated Holland’s Jewish community.
Unexpectedly, this book ends with two lines written and printed in the original Hebrew, from Isaiah 56:7. The Hebrew script and their visionary words dance on the page—‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’—with their promise of universal peace and harmony. In this way, Van der Wouden cites her Judaic inheritance unashamedly and powerfully. She is to be commended for her forthright focus on a nation’s culpability and the erasure of guilt. In so doing, she has woven these themes into a compelling story of four young people traversing new territory as best they can, given the constraints of a conservative if not reactionary society. Van der Wouden has deservedly won for herself a reputation as an author of merit.
The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden
Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK
2024
