47 pages • 1 hour read
Yael van der WoudenThe Safekeep
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Critical Context: Reception of The Safekeep
The Safekeep is Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel and has received widespread critical acclaim. Most notably, it was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, with the prize’s jury describing the book as “a remarkable debut about obsession and loss […] The author draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life” (“The Safekeep.” The Booker Prizes). The New York Times wrote, “The story is resolved in such a bold and tender way that it becomes not merely clever, but indelible” (Soderlind, Lori. “An Erotic Story of Love and Obsession in 1960s Amsterdam.” The New York Times, 25 May 2024). As that review suggests, much of the praise for the book is directed toward its third part, which resolves the mystery of Eva’s identity and her presence at the house in a dramatic, poetic fashion.
Other reviews pay closer attention to the book’s romantic and erotic components. The Michigan Daily calls it “a masterful take on the literary Queer romance,” comparing it to James Baldwin’s seminal works Giovanni’s Room and Another Country (Hetzler, Alex. “Booker Prize 2024: ‘The Safekeep’ Puts the Erotic in Neurotic.” The Michigan Daily, 24 Oct. 2024). This combination of historical narrative and poetic love story has won the novel critical praise.
Historical Context: The Netherlands in the Wake of the Holocaust
During the Holocaust, the Netherlands experienced a disproportionately high percentage of death. Roughly 75% of the country’s Jewish population was killed, compared to 42% of neighboring Belgium’s Jewish population and 21% of France’s Jewish population further west. This sweeping scale of death and cultural erasure had profound impacts on Dutch society. Though surviving members of the country’s Jewish community were intent on rebuilding what had been lost, they faced an apathetic response from the rest of the Dutch population. Professor Dawn Skorczewski, who specializes in the Holocaust, has said that the country entered “a period of silence when people didn’t speak about the war, what happened in their country, or in their neighborhood” (Siegal, Nina. “A Devastating Dutch Love Story, in the Shadow of Anne Frank.” The New York Times, 23 Oct. 2024).
This failure to acknowledge and provide support to the suffering Jewish community extended to the Dutch government’s policies in the decades following the war. Jewish orphans who had been sent to live with gentile members of the Dutch resistance for protection were frequently not returned to their original families because the government did not consider their Jewish birth an essential factor in determining guardianship. Historians call this orphan controversy “a direct continuation of the Holocaust and its prolonged aftermath of human suffering” (Fishman, Joel S. “The War Orphan Controversy in the Netherlands: Majority-Minority Relations.” Dutch Jewish History, Brill, 1984).
In The Safekeep, van der Wouden pays particular attention to the Dutch government’s failure to protect Jewish families from losing their homes due to mortgage debt after returning from concentration camps. The novel is thus an account of how trauma was continually inflicted on the Dutch Jewish community long after the Nazis had been expelled from the country.
