The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Eros and dispossession in the 1960s

If you'll forgive me for saying so, this must be the most erotic Holocaust novel ever written. Set in Holland in the early post-war years of the 1960s, it is a love story that begins with a hate story as many good love stories do. The only bad times that anyone remembers are the Dutch famine years of 1944-1946, and the painful story of Dutch suffering. In contrast, Jews are seemingly absent from consciousness. People went elsewhere. They were here, now they are gone. Who knows why?

This is the story of a family, three siblings and the girlfriend of one of the brothers, living in the aftermath of war and dispossession. The author expertly seduces the reader into the inner lives of the family members, a world of frozen feelings and deceptions, shallow or absent passions, devoid for some of all eros or any physical sexuality at all. But what happens in the fields and homes between the dykes of Holland can hardly be anticipated in the first third of the book. (Forgive me!)

The explosion of erotic energy in the second third of the book is all the more powerful for every indication having been given that no such thing even lurked in the background. (Perhaps someone erotically wiser than I would have seen what was about to come, but I did not!) But this is more than sexually and emotionally charged writing - the erotic tension has a deeply political and historical context. To say anything more would be to say too much.

I recommend this book very highly. It packs a punch. A person can learn how to be a writer by observing what Yael van der Wouden does here. Or a person can wile away a day or two in a gripping and emotional historically rooted tale of hatred and love and stunted passions and eros and wounds and healing. Either way, you will win.

I've always wondered what it would feel like to have published an explicit erotic scene or chapter. That's why I loved how in her final acknowledgements the author thanks friends and family, saying "Thank you all for not talking to me about chapter 10, you're very respectful people." :-)