The Subversive Legacy of the Holocaust, Onscreen and in Print
By Deidre Depke
My Book Report
The Ravages of Love
Have you seen The Brutalist? Yes, I know: It’s almost three-and-a-half-hours long. Plus that intermission. But trust me when I say it never drags and that there aren’t many better things you could be doing with that time. It’s February, people! Adrien Brody is magnificent. The film is a triumph.
I knew going in that the movie’s origin story was the Holocaust. Brody plays a Jewish survivor who has made his way to America, where he struggles to revive the career in brutalist architecture he had established in pre-war Budapest. But somewhere during those three-and-a-half hours, the plot shifts— becoming less the tale of an immigrant’s reinvention and more a meditation on the brutality and legacy of the death camps. It memorializes what was lost. And it questions how — and if — those memories can be honored in an America, then as now, drunk on its own avaricious, arrogant indifference.
The Safekeep, the mesmerizing 2024 novel by Dutch author Yael van der Wouden, has a similar sly and dreadful evolution. Written in English and long-listed for the Booker, the book is a slow-building story set in The Netherlands in 1961. The damage of the war has been repaired and the self-satisfied bourgeoisie have gotten on with their lives.
The novel’s protagonist, Isabel, is an unhappy, unpleasant 30-year-old living in her late-mother’s country home. Her brother unexpectedly coerces Isabel into taking in Eva, his girlfriend, for a month while he travels abroad. Eva is Isabel’s antithesis; boisterous and loud, sleeps late, and can’t keep her hands off Isabel’s belongings — most distressingly to Isabel, the silver and china left by her mother.
As their relationship evolves into infatuation and obsession, the plot shifts as well — from queer love story to an investigation of the recent past. Eva, as it turns out, is Jewish. She barely escaped the Nazis with her life.
I won’t say more; you should read this excellent, self-assured debut novel yourself. But it’s not revealing too much to say that van der Wouden eviscerates popular misconceptions about antisemitism in The Netherlands. Widely credited with trying to protect its Jewish population — think Anne Frank hiding in her Amsterdam attic — the Nazis actually killed 75 percent of the country’s Jews. That’s the highest percentage among Western European countries. After the war, the Dutch did virtually nothing to repatriate the country’s few survivors. The Dutch National Holocaust Museum wasn’t inaugurated until 2024. That’s last year.
Isabel’s home is an important presence in the book. It’s a device successfully used by Daniel Mason in his 2023 novel North Woods, the excellent story of a New England home that takes place over more than 300 years. This is a darker tale, however. The Safekeep’s coda, written in Hebrew and English, is simply Isiah 56:7.
I will bring them to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Stages of Life
A number of moons ago, I was an editor at a weekly newsmagazine. In those days, magazines were printed on paper and arrived in the mail, and we were convinced, rightly or not, that we were an important part of the national conversation.
We had many meetings in which we debated what to put on the cover: A national disaster? A military coup somewhere? Presidential scandal? Occasionally, there wouldn’t be a natural choice. That’s when we turned to the “back of the book” — softer stories about science, the arts, the latest diet trend and religion (lots of Jesus stories that always flew off newsstands).
There were a decent number of women around the table during these discussions — though none in the top two jobs. Still, we had our say. One conversation even now makes me laugh: A back-of-the-book writer suggested we do a cover story on the science around perimenopause. While the women enthusiastically discussed the subject and its symptoms (hot flashes, mood changes, vaginal…umm…dryness), the male editors mostly kept their eyes on the table. Ultimately, they agreed to the proposal — anything to get the discussion to stop.
Years later, perimenopause is the subject of one of last year’s most significant novels, All Fours, by Miranda July. We’ve come a long way, baby!
Or maybe not. The author told The New York Times that she wrote the book after searching for a novel on the subject. “This territory is so empty…. Your options seem to be like it’s not happening or maybe kind of go underground.”
July’s story centers on an unnamed heroine who is a few short years from menopause. Anxiety about the change of life, as it used to be called, looms large in her family’s history: Both her grandmother and an aunt killed themselves in their mid-fifties.
A semi-famous artist with a music producer for a husband and a child who is a non-binary second grader, she copes with her worries about the “estrogen cliff” by setting off on a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York. But just 30 minutes from home, she finds herself pulling into a down-at-the-heels motel. And there she stays, for weeks. She incongruously hires an interior designer to redecorate her grim little room with wallpaper, carpeting, a new mattress, and expensive bath products. The motel owner, let’s just say, is perplexed.
It's all a bid to win the attentions of a young, male Hertz employee with whom she launches a…love affair, I guess. The sex is kind of hard to describe, other than to say it’s graphic and insatiable. Tampons and pee are involved. Fallout, including a renegotiation of her marriage, are a result.
As much fantasy as narrative, the novel digs deep into questions around the hormonal lives of women.
“What’s the best thing about being postmenopausal?” the artist asks her gynecologist. “Well, a woman’s mental health is usually better than it’s been at any other time in life,” the doctor replies.
The artist group-texts the question to other women. The response is electric.
“My chronic migraines stopped.”
“I feel like I can do whatever I want.”
“I lost the ability to believe in god.”
“What other people do or say has become kind of irrelevant.”
The novel is revelatory — and entirely enjoyable. Would those male magazine editors enjoy this book? Maybe not. But lots of people did: The Times named it the best novel of 2024.