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House on Endless Waters

von Emunah Elon

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17519153,790 (4.28)28
"For fans of The Invisible Bridge and The History of Love, a lyrical and exquisitely moving novel about a writer who embarks on a transformative journey in Amsterdam, where he discovers the shocking truth about his mother's wartime experience-unearthing a remarkable story that becomes the subject of his magnum opus. At the behest of his agent, renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to meet with his Dutch publisher, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon a looping reel of photos offering a glimpse of pre-war Dutch Jewish life, and is astonished to see the youthful face of his beloved mother staring back at him, posing with her husband, Yoel's older sister, Nettie...and an infant he doesn't recognize. This unsettling discovery launches him into a fervent search for the truth, revealing Amsterdam's dark wartime history and the underground networks which hid Jewish children away from danger-but at a cost. The deeper into the past Yoel digs, the better he understands his mother's silence, and the more urgent the question that has unconsciously haunted him for a lifetime-Who am I?-becomes. Evocative, insightful, and deeply resonant, House on Endless Waters beautifully illustrates the complex nature of identity and belonging, and the inextricability of past and present"--… (mehr)
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I’m done House on Endless Waters. As promised there was a big plot twist at the end. I still find the book puzzling. The MC’s mother lied to him his whole life about who he was. He began his life as a Jewish child in Holland. He escaped as a child with his mother and his sister. His mother made him promise never to return to Holland. He became a famous Israeli author and a few years after his mother died he agreed to go to Holland to publicize his latest book. And while visiting a Jewish Museum there, he saw a film clip of his mother and sister with a male child who wasn’t him. Spurred by that, he returns to Holland to investigate his origins and write a novel about it.
At that point the book develops multiple story/time lines. He is in Holland in the present - his mother and sister and the boy who is not him are in Holland in the past - and sometimes they are all there in a present/past blend. He has a interesting encounter in the present in Holland with his own grandson. He realizes that as an adult he has had a blind spot where children are concerned. That he pretty much ignored them until they were older. His grandson plays an important role in reconciling Yoel with his past. I would have liked to better understand why his mother made the choices she did and why she never wanted him to know the truth. ( )
  dianeham | Mar 10, 2024 |
Israeli author Yoel Blum has been avoiding visiting Holland all his life, part of a promise he made his mother, but when his novels are translated into Dutch he is persuaded to go there. He puts pressure on his older sister Hettie to tell him secrets his mother kept from him, and after the initial visit, he returns to Amsterdam a week later and takes up residence in an old hotel to begin researching what he plans to be his next novel, a story that evolves out of his origins.

An interesting novel about the treatment of the Jews in Amsterdam during WWII.

Elon is trying to do several things in the novel, as well as the history of the era, she is offering an insight into the creation of a work of fiction that may evolve out of a true story, and showing how one might choose to present/style a novel. As someone interested in creativity this would be of interest to me, but I wonder if it over weights an already weighty subject.

My other main criticism is that I can never keep Yoel in my head at the age he should be, a man in his 70s+. It's not a problem I have often.

That said, the Amsterdam described is an Amsterdam I recognise and have visited 7-8 times. She certainly gets the place right.

Because of other reading I was familiar with the history in Amsterdam in this era. ( )
1 abstimmen Caroline_McElwee | Jan 5, 2024 |
The strongest part of this novel is not its descriptions of the Nazi occupation on a Dutch Jewish family, although they are quite strong, but the way it illustrates the creative process by which an author transmutes experience into fiction. Emuna Elon's protagonist, Yoel Blum, is a prominent Israeli novelist sojourning in Amsterdam, where he researches his own family history -- both to quell his own inner demons, and to use in his next novel, a fictionalized account of his own family's experience during the Occupation. The reader of Elon's intricately constructed novel witnesses Blum seeking out new experiences that enable him to get into the heads of *his* characters, even as those same experiences teach Blum much about himself.

4 stars.... ( )
  Dreyfusard | Oct 15, 2023 |
good read about an author returning to Amsterdam to find what happened to his family during the holocaust. well done. learned a lot ( )
  evatkaplan | Sep 12, 2023 |
Just when you think you might have read every story possible about the treatment of Jews during World War II, some remarkably talented author will produce a book that addresses a new and different experience. Then you realize the variations are endless, myriad, just like the souls caught up in the horrors of the Holocaust, because when 11 million people die, there are 11 million stories that could be told.

In Emuna Elon’s novel, House on Endless Waters, Yoel Blum is an Israeli writer whose publisher sends him to The Netherlands to promote his latest release. Although his mother was Dutch, she always made him promise that he would never go there, so he feels a bit of guilt stepping off the plane into a country that is his birthplace but has always been forbidden to him. What he discovers in Amsterdam is that his mother had another life before the war than the one he knows of, and that much of what he has believed all of his life is not entirely true.

The story is told in two timelines, not an unusual device, but Elon does it is what seemed to me a very unique way. The timelines run almost parallel to one another, so that we might be in the past with Sonia and in the present with Yoel in the same paragraph. It sounds as if it might be confusing, but I did not find it to be at all. In fact, it made the two characters seem more closely connected and gave the book a flow that is often missing in a dual timeline story that bounces between the two stories from chapter to chapter.

Besides being deftly written, this story was entirely engaging. There were moments in which I found myself breathing shallow breaths in anticipation of the next event. Sometimes familiarity with the history of the period can make the most shocking cruelties seem all too commonplace, but Elon knows exactly how to make you feel, rather than just know, what is occuring. She never overplays her hand, rather she allows it to sneak up on you, just as it did on those who were engulfed in it.

In the end, the novel raises many important questions. Some of them have been asked over and over again, without getting any closer to an answer. Why did no one see where this could go? Why did Jewish leaders comply so readily with each step in the process, right up to the bitter end? What would you do if you found yourself in this situation? To what extent would you go to save your child? Who would you sacrifice to protect yourself and yours?

Whatever was, was. Those waters have already flowed onward. Sonia tells Yoel early on. But what we discover, with Yoel, is that the waters that have flowed have changed the terrain as they passed. The past informs the future. We are altered by it, and everyone touched by this becomes a different person than they would otherwise have been. Not all waters are cleansing.

Thanks to Atria Books and Emuna Elon for allowing me an advanced copy of this marvelous book. ( )
  mattorsara | Aug 11, 2022 |
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AutorennameRolleArt des AutorsWerk?Status
Emunah ElonHauptautoralle Ausgabenberechnet
Yehiel, Lin­daÜbersetzerCo-Autoreinige Ausgabenbestätigt
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"For fans of The Invisible Bridge and The History of Love, a lyrical and exquisitely moving novel about a writer who embarks on a transformative journey in Amsterdam, where he discovers the shocking truth about his mother's wartime experience-unearthing a remarkable story that becomes the subject of his magnum opus. At the behest of his agent, renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to meet with his Dutch publisher, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon a looping reel of photos offering a glimpse of pre-war Dutch Jewish life, and is astonished to see the youthful face of his beloved mother staring back at him, posing with her husband, Yoel's older sister, Nettie...and an infant he doesn't recognize. This unsettling discovery launches him into a fervent search for the truth, revealing Amsterdam's dark wartime history and the underground networks which hid Jewish children away from danger-but at a cost. The deeper into the past Yoel digs, the better he understands his mother's silence, and the more urgent the question that has unconsciously haunted him for a lifetime-Who am I?-becomes. Evocative, insightful, and deeply resonant, House on Endless Waters beautifully illustrates the complex nature of identity and belonging, and the inextricability of past and present"--

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