The author Yael van der Wouden stood in her slippers at the front door of a canal house in the Dutch city of Utrecht. “Let me prepare you for the journey ahead,” she said, smiling. “There will be a lot of stairs.”
She turned and led the way through a long darkened hallway, up a narrow staircase, to another winding hallway, and up more stairs to reach her attic-level apartment in the back of the building.
“My landlady calls it ‘het achterhuis,’” said van der Wouden, once inside the cozy interior with slanting roof beams, decorated with books and bric-a-brac. “She’s about 90, and I don’t think she quite understands what that means to me.”
“Het Achterhuis,” is the Dutch title of Anne Frank’s famous World War II diary. In English, it is often translated as “the secret annex,” referring to the storage space where the teen diarist and her family hid to escape the Nazis for more than two years. But “achterhuis” is also just a term for the back part of a house, and van der Wouden, who is Israeli and Dutch, does not fault her landlady for missing the reference.
“It feels like just another part of existing invisibly, where no one quite thinks about the full effect of their words,” van der Wouden said.
“The Safekeep,” van der Wouden’s debut novel and one of six books shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, is full of such clashing perspectives. Words that mean one thing to a character can hold explosive charge for another. Seemingly innocuous objects like silver spoons, or a single shard of broken china, become emotional land mines.
Van der Wouden wrote the novel in English, which made it eligible for the Booker. In a statement announcing the prize shortlist, the judges described the novel as, “a quietly devastating queer love story which reveals itself to be a story of the Holocaust,” adding that “it shows how alternate truths are held in fissile connection, something that is relevant to today’s world.”
The home that is central to the novel holds multiple conflicting meanings to each of its characters. The house in question is in the province of Overijssel, in eastern Netherlands, and the protagonist, Isabel, has lived there alone since her two brothers, Hendrik and Louis, moved out and her mother died.
The year is 1961, 16 years after the end of World War II, and Isabel has built her childhood memories and sense of identity around the objects the house contains, which she guards anxiously.
She tends lovingly to its garden and hopes that all of the beautiful objects of her family’s inheritance will someday be hers, although, as a woman, she has no real claim to ownership.
Then one day, a stranger named Eva arrives and disrupts her solitude, upturning her world.
What unfolds is a psychological thriller and erotic love story between two women whose worlds could, at first, not seem further apart. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, the writer Lori Soderlind, described it as “a steady revelation, piece by piece, that continues to deepen the narrative with each chapter.”
Much of the book’s tension comes from its setting in the postwar years, which Dawn Skorczewski, a researcher in Holocaust studies who teaches at Amsterdam University College, called “a period of silence” in the Netherlands, “when people didn’t speak about the war, what happened in their country, or in their neighborhood.”
Bettine Siertsema, who teaches Holocaust-era literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said only a handful of titles in Dutch literature had touched upon these postwar tensions, including “Bitter Herbs” by Marga Minco and “The Evenings,” by Gerard Reve, or the 2021 novel, “De vier elementen” (“The Four Elements”), by Robert Pollack.
What sets “The Safekeep” apart, Skorczewski said, was its focus on two female characters, Isabel and Eva. “Often women are seen only as savior figures in wartime narratives, and in this book, that’s not the case,” she said. “They’re part of this — they’re also victims, perpetrators and bystanders.”
Born in Israel in 1987 to a Jewish mother of Romanian and Bulgarian heritage, and a (non-Jewish) Dutch father, van der Wouden is the eldest of three daughters. Both of her parents were artists who worked in film and television, including making stop-motion animation for an Israeli adaptation of “Sesame Street.” She confessed that she did not write, or even read, much at a young age, but that she did invent stories in her head.
“As a kid, if I couldn’t fall asleep, I would pretend to put a VCR in my mind,” she said. “I’ve never let that go, this habit of telling myself stories when things are stressful,” she added. “Eventually, I graduated from Disney stories to my own stories.”
Her first decade was spent in Ramat Gan, a city just east of Tel Aviv, where she was part of a tight-knit community, and went to a “hippie” school, as she described it, where the children were all very social, with love affairs and popularity contests, “like little adults.”
When her father tried to teach her Dutch, his native language, she refused, seeing no reason to learn it. “I said to my father, ‘Why would I speak your stupid language when we aren’t going to go there anyway?” she said, covering her face with her hands at the memory. “The karma got me.”
At home, her parents spoke English to each other and the children spoke English and Hebrew. When she was 10, her family moved to the Netherlands, first staying with her paternal grandparents in a tiny town in the north of the country. The change of lifestyle was drastic. “I went from growing up in artsy fartsy Tel Aviv to being the only Jew in the village,” she said. “It was very jarring. I looked a lot like Anne Frank when I moved here, and for a lot of kids in my school, Anne Frank was the only Jewish person they’d ever seen.”
The comparison to Anne Frank would dog her throughout her life in the Netherlands, as van der Wouden described in a 2017 essay for The Sun magazine, “On (Not) Reading Anne Frank.” It was not meant as a compliment, but rather one entry in a catalog of antisemitic insults she said she endured throughout her school years.
Growing up Jewish in the Netherlands often involved moving from one narrative to another, van der Wouden said. One was the popular story that the Dutch resisted the Nazi occupation and protected its Jews, like Anne Frank, by hiding them in attics. The other was that 75 percent of the Jewish population was deported and killed, including Anne Frank.
Those who survived came back to a country that failed to acknowledge the losses of Jewish people, and sometimes even their existence. It was that invisibility that van der Wouden explored in her novel.
Thanks to the success of her book, van der Wouden will soon move out of her Utrecht and into a newer home in the city of Rotterdam. “I was living in an attic and now I get to have a garden,” she said. “A garden has always been the dream.”
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