CANR
WORK TITLE: The Safekeep
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WEBSITE: https://yaelvanderwouden.com/
CITY: Utrecht
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COUNTRY: Netherlands
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PERSONAL
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel; immigrated to Netherlands in the 1990s.
EDUCATION:Attended Utrecht University and State University of New York, Binghamton.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Has taught creative writing, storytelling, and literature at Parnassos, Writer’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rietveld Academie, and Maastricht University’s Center for European Studies; Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands, literature instructor and head of creative writing summer school, 2021-22.
WRITINGS
Contributor of advice column “Dear David” to Longleaf Review. Contributor to periodicals and websites, including Barrelhouse, Sun, and the Jewish Book Council website.
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]Yael van der Wouten is an Israeli Dutch writer with a vested interest in the place of Jewish culture in the Netherlands. She was born in Tel Aviv to an Israeli mother with Bulgarian and Romanian heritage and a Dutch gentile father. In the 1990s, when she was ten, her family moved to the Netherlands. She preferred television as a youth, but its getting rationed in her grandparents’ house led to an affection for literature, and she was writing stories by age twelve. From her parents, both animators, she learned to pattern narratives with storyboards. As she relates in her esteemed 2017 essay “On (Not) Reading Anne Frank,” she encountered recurring antisemitism in her adoptive home country; throughout her schooling, even in university, people saw fit to comment that she resembled Anne Frank. She gained her higher education in the Netherlands as well as the United States, studying comparative literature at Utrecht University and SUNY-Binghamton. She has taught through several institutions and started leading Utrecht University’s summer creative writing program in 2021.
In a Shelf Awareness interview, van der Wouten meditated on the connections between her own life experiences, those of her generational peers, and the story she tells in her first novel. She related: “The most common story … from Dutch Jewish people of my generation is they grew up not knowing they were Jewish. Around age 20, 25, when their grandparents got older, the story came out: they were Jewish and either had to hide during the war or decide to convert entirely. They were so traumatized by being recognized as Jewish that they just wiped it clean.” With spiritual humility she added, “I grew up within Jewish culture, so a lot of those friends came to me. I was always embarrassed to tell them I can give you the songs, the rituals, but the real, true, in-depth knowledge, I do not have.”
The Safekeep, van der Wouten’s debut novel, finds thirty-year-old Isabel frittering away her days as caretaker of her family’s home in eastern Netherlands in 1961. Her parents brought her and her siblings there in 1944, owing to famine in the west, and amidst her cataloging of silver and other goods she finds some unexplained ceramic shards in the garden. While her brother Hendrick is out of touch—living with a close male friend named Sebastian—her brother Louis, who owns the house, surprises her by bringing his latest girlfriend, Eva, to stay while he travels for business. Isabel finds Eva’s bleached hair tacky and worries about things going missing, but suspicion gives way to attraction as Isabel and Eva slide into a steamy love affair. Eva is reticent about her family history, declining to explain how her parents died and mentioning little more than misfortune at a childhood birthday party. Isabel is in for an awakening when she learns from Eva’s diary just what Eva and her loved ones have been through.
A Kirkus Reviews writer called van der Wouten’s debut “brilliant …, as multifaceted as a gem.” Enjoying how her “spare prose gives way to the lush mystery Eva carries,” the reviewer deemeed The Safekeep a “beautifully realized book, nearly perfect,” as the author “quietly explores the intricate nuances” of sibling conflict, illicit desire, self-discovery, and the ethics of war. In BookPage, Lauren Bufferd described the novel as one of “redemption as much as revenge. … The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.” Gabrielle Schwarz, in the Daily Telegraph, was inclined to note that “there are copious sex scenes, narrated with a choreographic precision that can sometimes have the inadvertent effect of making you feel like you’re reading stage directions.” In the Shelf Awareness interview, van der Youten expressed that for her, “erotica is about the knife’s edge of voyeurism and participation. … Good erotic writing makes you a little uncomfortable.” In the Bookseller, Madeleine Feeny found The Safekeep to be “at once a fervid tale of lesbian awakening and forbidden love, and something altogether darker, which seizes you by the throat” in a “masterclass in dramatic tension.” Feeny appreciated how van der Wouten’s debut ultimately “asks how we can bounce back from history, deal with guilt productively, and move forward together.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, June, 2024, Lauren Bufferd, review of The Safekeep, p. 21.
Bookseller, February 23, 2024, Madeleine Feeny, review of The Safekeep, p. 38.
Daily Telegraph, May 18, 2024, Gabrielle Schwarz, review of The Safekeep. p. 15.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2024, review of The Safekeep.
ONLINE
Shelf Awareness, https://pagesofjulia.com/ (February 16, 2024), “Maximum Shelf Author Interview: Yael van der Wouden.”
Yael van der Wouden website, https://yaelvanderwouden.com (June 16, 2024).
My background is in comparative literature (Utrecht University and SUNY Binghamton), specialised in cultural memory and landscape. I’ve taught creative writing & storytelling (Parnassos; Writer’s Guide to the Galaxy; Rietveld Academie), literature (Maastricht University, CES; Utrecht University). In ‘21 and ‘22 I headed Utrecht University’s Creative Fiction & Non-Fiction summer school.
My work has been published in places such as The Sun Magazine, Barrelhouse Magazine, The Jewish Book Council, amongst others. My essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank was listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2018. My short stories have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize.
My David Attenborough-themed advice column, “Dear David”, can be found over at Longleaf Review.
My first novel, THE SAFEKEEP, will be published in 2024 with Avid Reader (US) & Viking (UK). More info forthcoming!
Maximum Shelf author interview: Yael van der Wouden
Posted on February 16, 2024 by pagesofjulia
Following Monday’s review of The Safekeep, here’s Yael van der Wouden: ‘All That’s Left of Them.’
Yael van der Wouden was born in Tel Aviv and currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her debut novel, The Safekeep, a quiet consideration of the aftermath of World War II in the Dutch countryside, will be published by Avid Reader Press in May 2024.
What about this story needed telling?
Yael van der Wouden (photo: Roosmarijn Broersen)
The most common story you hear from Dutch Jewish people of my generation is they grew up not knowing they were Jewish. Around age 20, 25, when their grandparents got older, the story came out: they were Jewish and either had to hide during the war or decide to convert entirely. They were so traumatized by being recognized as Jewish that they just wiped it clean. I have a lot of friends around me who around that age started digging into that history. I think I leaned heavily into that.
My mother is Israeli but her heritage is Bulgarian and Romanian, and my dad is not Jewish. He’s Dutch. My Jewishness is not related to my Dutchness. I grew up within Jewish culture, so a lot of those friends came to me. I was always embarrassed to tell them I can give you the songs, the rituals, but the real, true, in-depth knowledge, I do not have. But I guess when you have nothing, then anything resembling a cultural narrative is a lot.
I spent a lot of my 20s in a turmoil of frustration and anger around how nonexistent Jewish heritage is in the Netherlands. It’s been cannibalized: taken apart and consumed by mainstream Dutch culture. There’s a lot of Yiddish in Dutch, which is very confusing when no one is Jewish but everyone says words you understand. How did this word get here? Mazzel, or punim which means face, or lef which means bravery, heart. There were traces. Empty synagogues, houses with David stars on them but no one lives there anymore… it’s as if–no, it is that an entire community of people has just disappeared overnight. And no one ever asked where they went.
All that’s left of them is the traces of language, and locale. The places where they lived. When I started to notice what was around me and what was not present, I (in very 20s fashion) became very frustrated and angry. It’s a conversation that I’ve been having with myself and with people around me ever since. What needs to happen with that history? What does an apology mean? Who is the apology for? Is it for the person who apologizes, or is it for the person on the other end, who receives it? I don’t want an apology. What kind of acknowledgement do I want? That’s the question that’s been on my mind for a long time.
What’s changed in the Netherlands?
If one person is born into responsibility, and the other person is born into misery, how do you marry the two? In that conversation I was having with myself, it’s more than acknowledgment. “Yes, this happened. Yes, I’m sorry.” What I wanted for these characters is for them to find the next step, which I believe is desire. Desire to have the other person around. Desire to have the other person stay. The other side of the coin.
The Netherlands had one of the highest percentages of deported people during World War II. The narrative is that the Dutch had a great resistance, they helped people hide, but actually a lot of people asked for money to hide people. Only people who had wealth could hide. The Dutch are very big on bureaucracy. So when the German officers and officials asked, where are the Jews and where do they live, the Dutch just said, here they are. That’s why it happened so quickly, across the board. They were very efficient. For me the flip side of not caring that someone is going to be taken away is desiring the person to come back, desiring them to stay. How do we take ignorance and prejudice and flip it into desire? I don’t think that tolerance and acceptance is the solution. I think desire is the solution. I wanted to take Isabel and crack her open and see what would happen if that small life, that small way of thinking, were filled up with desire.
The conversation about Jewish life in the modern-day Netherlands is either about the war, or Israel and Palestine. When the Dutch talk about Jews they talk about those who have died or those who are not there. It’s never about the present, the people who live here and how we are a part of society. It feels invisible–and at the same time, I don’t want my visibility to be connected to death. I want it to be about Passover or Rosh Hashanah, or anything else. When you talk about somebody only in the context of them not being there, you’re emphasizing that they don’t belong in your midst. And that goes back to the idea of desire. Maybe it’s a childish thing. I just want to be desired.
Your book includes some lovely erotic writing.
For me, erotica is about the knife’s edge of voyeurism and participation. As a reader, you want to feel like you are present, but if you are too present then I think the text tries to envelope you, tries to comfort, and I think good erotic writing makes you a little uncomfortable.
Zoom in, zoom out. Zoom in on a body part–ideally you don’t zoom in on a body part that is sexual. An elbow, the tip of the nose. Something unexpected. Then you contrast that with something that is very sexual or very obvious. I think that’s how you create that erotic tension.
People sometimes enter into it with their own discomfort, and rather than treat it earnestly, they make it either as weird as possible or as disgusting as possible. Every body part, all the filthy juices. They will not create something attractive, but lean into an element of disgust. I think you need a little bit of disgust, but it should be a palette. It needs to be a good goulash: the sour, the sweet, the savory. You have to be completely earnest about it or it will not work. You need to fully mean to write something personal and intimate.
What do you feel makes a fascinating protagonist?
Everybody will have a different answer. For me the answer is quite similar to the question of what makes good erotica. I think the answer is contrast. Conflict. My favorite line about protagonists is from E.M. Forster. When he talks about Maurice, he says he wanted to write the most normal, run-of-the-mill guy, and then give him something that upends his worldview. For Maurice, it is that he falls in love with a man. The entire mechanism of him has to change in order to accommodate this thing within him that doesn’t fit within the norm. I think that’s the most fascinating character. Somebody who has their idea of who they are, and then you throw something in the middle that topples that Jenga tower. Those are the most interesting moments in our lives, when you have this idea of who you are and something or somebody comes along and you realize, oh, no–I had no idea who I was.
This interview originally ran on January 17, 2024 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.
Byline: Gabrielle SCHWARZ THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden
272pp, Viking , T PS14.99 (0808 196 6794), RRPPS16.99, ebook PS8.99
The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden's twisty debut novel, opens with an apparently mundane scene. In the summer of 1961, a young woman named Isabel finds a buried ceramic fragment while gardening at her family home in the Dutch countryside - where she still lives, now alone, her parents long since dead and her siblings having flown the coop. She recognises the pattern from a set of crockery in the house, although she doesn't remember any of the pieces ever being broken.
It's a minor puzzle, quickly set aside when bigger problems arise: Isabel's eldest brother, Louis, who owns the house, announces that his new girlfriend, Eva, will be staying there while he is away on business. At first, the buttoned-up Isabel can't stand Eva, or indeed any intrusion upon her rigorously controlled and isolated existence. But gradually her hostility mutates into sexual desire. The two women embark on a passionate affair. No time to fret about broken pottery now.
Van der Wouden first came to attention with her 2017 essay On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, which recounted her experiences of anti- Semitism after moving as a child, in the 1990s, from Israel to the Netherlands. (At school and university, she was repeatedly told she looked like Anne Frank, the most famous of Dutch Jews.) The Safekeep initially seems like a departure: a historical novel about forbidden queer desire in the postwar period.
Isabel, whose perspective is conveyed via the close thirdperson for most of the novel, goes to church every Sunday. Her family moved to the east Netherlands in 1944 to escape the famine in the west. The Holocaust and the fate of Jews who survived it: these aren't things she thinks about. But Van der Wouden's clues aren't particularly subtle. From that opening scene, it's obvious that Isabel doesn't know the real story of the fully furnished house she has occupied for the past two decades. Eva, meanwhile, has dark frizzy roots that show through her bleached-blonde hair, is vague about how or when her parents died, keeps a carefully guarded diary, and once tells a story about some fancy plates that were broken during a birthday party at her childhood home.
It takes Isabel longer than the reader to work out what's going on, probably because she's so preoccupied by the awakening of her erotic desires. There are copious sex scenes, narrated with a choreographic precision that can sometimes have the inadvertent effect of making you feel like you're reading stage directions. (An example: "They were at eye level like this: Isabel kneeling, Eva perched on the bed's edge.") In general, Van der Wouden's prose is tightly worked, but she's prone to overdoing the details, particularly when describing the weather: the sun "spread[s] her arms wide open", and on a windy day the trees are "gossiping with shaking leaves". And yet the story of Isabel and Eva's secret affair, and all the complications that emerge from it, remains compulsively readable, carrying you through to the sudden shift in perspective in the third act, when Isabel decides to read her lover's diary.
The final section of The Safekeep draws on historical research - some of it relatively recent - into how Jews were treated in the Netherlands after the Holocaust. As well as revealing her own story, Eva's diary entries include horrifying accounts of friends who survived the concentration camps and returned home only to be landed with bills from the Dutch government - for "outstanding taxes" on unoccupied properties, or debts accrued while recovering in Switzerland - which plunged them into poverty.
Yet, as Van der Wouden told us in 2017, the Dutch have never shown much guilt. It takes falling in love with a Jewish woman for Isabel to wake up to what her family, and others like them, have done. Even so, in the end her political awakening didn't seem, to me, as successful as her sexual one. I wondered whether Van der Wouden had felt compelled to give The Safekeep the kind of ending that befits a queer romance of today. Such an ending may be satisfying; but it may also stop us having a proper reckoning with the past.
To order any of these books from the Telegraph, visit books. telegraph.co.uk or call 0808 196 6794
CAPTION(S):
Dutch courage: essayist and novelist Yael van der Wouden
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Daily Telegraph
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"Lust and the Holocaust? Not ideal bedfellows. This 1960s-set debut novel struggles with Holland's dark history." Daily Telegraph [London, England], 18 May 2024, p. 15. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A794212501/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b1779313. Accessed 25 May 2024.
Borne novels demand to be written. One such is The Safekeep, Dutch-Jewish author Yael van der Wouden's intense, confounding debut, which tumbled out of her in six months. Over video call from N ew York--where she's visiting her friend Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam--she acknowledges what a rare gift this is. "The story kind of descended upon me. I know this will only happen once in my life." The Utrecht-based author sent it to Winn's agent; it sparked nine-way auctions in the UK and the US and sold in a further 12 countries.
When two of van der Wouden's grandparents passed away within one week in 2021, she noticed the contrast between the clamorous Jewish shiva in Tel Aviv (which she attended remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions) and the sober Calvinist funeral in the Netherlands. This sense of her cultural duality percolated along with a short story she had written about three siblings, and her experience of growing up Jewish in the Netherlands, which she had explored in an acclaimed essay, "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank".
When she was 10, her family moved from her mother's homeland, Israel, to her father's, the Netherlands. There she experienced anti-Semitism and learnt what it means to live in a country where your culture and language are invisible. "But if you walk through the city, and you're paying attention, you will see traces of Jewish families." The plot hinges on this history of dispossession and erasure and is based on true stories about the legacy of the Holocaust that swirl around the Dutch Jewish community.
Set in the conservative Dutch countryside in 1961, The Safekeep is at once a fervid tale of lesbian awakening and forbidden love, and something altogether darker, which seizes you by the throat. A masterclass in dramatic tension, it immerses you in the repressed, regimented world of Isabel, who lives alone in her family home at nearly 30, caring obsessively for her late mother's belongings. Hostile, paranoid and resentful, Isabel is not a likeable protagonist, but framing the story from her third-person perspective earns the reader's sympathy, so when the twist comes, they are shocked with her. It was freeing and cathartic to write a character who is so rude without caring what people think, "and still give her love, make her redeemable and create understanding for why somebody behaves a certain way".
Isabel feels abandoned by her brothers: serial dater Louis, and Hendrick, who absconded as a teenager after their mother rejected his sexuality, and now lives with his partner Sebastian (in the Netherlands, homosexual acts between adults have been legal since 1911). At the sibling dinner that opens the book, Isabel is typically sour to Louis' latest squeeze, Eva, a giddy bottle blonde. When Louis insists that Eva stay with Isabel for a month while he's away, she's furious-not just at the intrusion, but at her own powerlessness, for, as the eldest son, Louis owns the house. The pathos and irony of Isabel's quasi-religious devotion to it highlight the social and economic limitations on women's lives at the time.
Isabel keeps suspicious eyes trained on her unwelcome houseguest, but her surveillance takes an unexpected turn. As Isabel's sexuality blossoms, she stops counting teaspoons and surrenders to passion, played out in scenes that expertly navigate the connection between desire and disgust. Van der Wouden, a university lecturer who teaches a course on erotic fiction, says writing sex seriously, without leaning into the humour or disgust, is "very vulnerable, terrifying". What ratchets up the tension, in this and all the best romances, are the many personal and societal reasons the lovers should resist the chemistry between them.
Inscribed into the novel's lesbian DNA is the guiding light of Sarah Waters. Other influences include E M Forster, Zadie Smith, Carmen Maria Machado and--a curveball--Nick Hornby. Reading came late to van Der Wouden, who was reluctantly driven to it by the rationing of television in her Dutch grandparents' home--which inspired Isabel's in atmosphere, if not architecture. By age 12, she was writing her own stories. Her parents are animators, so film is the household's lingua franca (alongside English, her parents' shared language) and from them she learned to think in storyboards, meticulously mapping the novel's structure before putting word to page. Her next project--tantalisingly pitched as "what if Regina George fron 'Mean Girls' survived the apocalypse"--explores similar questions in a very different context.
Although The Safekeep is designed to make readers think about complicity and what we take for granted, it is not a lesson in guilt. "This is not the Calvinist story, this is the Jewish story, where there's always potential for change and understanding." Instead, it asks how we can bounce back from history, deal with guilt productively, and move forward together "from a place of love".
Viking, 30th May, 16.99 [pounds sterling], hb, 9780241652305
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Stage Media Limited
http://www.thebookseller.com
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Feeny, Madeleine. "Yael van der Wouden: The Safekeep." The Bookseller, no. 6055, 23 Feb. 2024, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784195453/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=499e67eb. Accessed 25 May 2024.
van der Wouden, Yael THE SAFEKEEP Avid Reader Press (Fiction None) $28.00 5, 28 ISBN: 9781668034347
Two women spend a fraught summer together in the Dutch countryside.
When she first meets Eva, Isabel is not just unimpressed; she finds her worthy of mockery. The latest in her brother Louis' long list of girlfriends, Eva has cheaply dyed hair and a cheaply made dress and, when they all go out for dinner, doesn't know what scallops are. Van der Wouden's brilliant debut novel opens in 1961 in the Netherlands; World War II has ended, but the trauma of the war years is etched as deeply into the Dutch landscape as are the craters left by actual bombs. Isabel has become a caretaker for the old house she and her siblings grew up in. She spends her isolated days in regimented fashion, polishing silver and visiting the post office. "She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house," van der Wouden writes. Isabel's routine--and, eventually, everything she thought she knew about herself and her family--is disrupted when Eva comes to spend a few weeks with her while Louis is away for work. Even van der Wouden's spare prose gives way to the lush mystery Eva carries with her: "How quickly did the belly of despair turn itself over into hope, the give of the skin of overripe fruit." This is a beautifully realized book, nearly perfect, as van der Wouden quietly explores the intricate nuances of resentment-hued sibling dynamics, the discovery of desire (and the simultaneous discovery of self), queer relationships at a time when they went unspoken, and the legacy of war and what it might mean to have been complicit in its horrors.
A brilliant debut, as multifaceted as a gem.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"van der Wouden, Yael: THE SAFEKEEP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A791876812/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=77e31000. Accessed 25 May 2024.
By Yael van der Wouden
The Safekeep (Avid Reader, $28, 9781668034347), Yael van der Wouden's debut novel, is set in 1961 rural Holland. At 30, Isabel is living in the house where she was raised, guarding her dead mother's things, suspecting the maid of theft and fending off the attentions of a flirtatious neighbor. Of her brothers, Louis and Hendrik, she is closer to Hendrik, although she disapproves of his friend Sebastian, suspecting a deeper connection. Of Louis and the steady stream of girlfriends he introduces to her, she thinks even less. Until Eva.
The siblings meet Eva at a dinner out. With her clumsy manners and brassy dyed hair, she hardly impresses, and Isabel is shocked when Louis brings her to the house to stay while he goes away on business, showing Eva to their mother's room. Even under Isabel's watchful eye, things begin to disappear--a spoon, a bowl, a thimble. More alarming to Isabel is the overwhelming attraction she feels to Eva, an attraction that spills into an obsessive, intensely depicted sexual relationship.
As Isabel and Eva's connection unfolds, Van der Wouden's true subject comes into view: how ordinary people were implicated in the ethnic cleansing that took place during World War II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her peers are quick to notice people who appear different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel risks turning on herself as she comes to terms with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 BookPage
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Bufferd, Lauren. "The Safekeep." BookPage, June 2024, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793260450/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1a0b29f1. Accessed 25 May 2024.