The Jewish Holocaust orphan Jay's life story is linked to tales of deep hatreds, profound love, and paralyzing fears. The storyteller is Harold. He had been Jay's boyhood friend and only discovered late in life that Jay was one of a small number of Dutch Jews who had not been killed by Hitler and his murderous goons. The hatred in this story is projected through the character of a Dutch Nazi who first raped Jay's mom and later killed her. The love is presented through the story of the three-way friendship between Jay's adoptive mom, his natural mom, and Harold's uncle. The paralyzing fears in the story are portrayed through the character of Jay's adoptive dad who, even after the war, was still too afraid to tell Jay about his birth mom. The ongoing drama in this three-family story is repeatedly brought to the fore through the actions of Harold's dad who had the bravado of a storm chaser but the attention span of a two-year-old. Jay's story is a parable in the sense that Hitler's henchmen usually, but not always, used violence and fear as tools to suppress the spirit of love in the Netherlands during WWII and afterwards.
Richard Reitsma is a retired library director who was born in the Netherlands and came to Canada in 1955. He went back to the Netherlands and finished a PhD in Dutch history in 1982. He heard many stories from his parents’ generation about the five years of German occupation but little about the Holocaust. This, his first historical novel, is a fictional portrayal about the sources of that mysterious “forgetfulness,” on the part of his parents’ generation.
