House on Endless Waters

Joel Bloom is a successful Israeli writer whose books have been widely translated. To mark the publication of his third book to be translated into Dutch, he complies with his agent’s pleading and flies to Amsterdam to promote it. Although he was born there, this is his first trip back, because of a promise he made to his late mother Sonia, a Holocaust survivor – it was in the Netherlands that she lost her husband, her parents and her siblings. Only she, her daughter Netty and her baby son Joel survived.

In Amsterdam, Joel and his wife visit the Jewish museum. And there, in an old black and white movie depicting Jewish life just before the Holocaust, he spots his mother holding a baby. But Joel is sure that the fair-haired child who looks like Sonia, is not himself. Did he have a brother? And if so, what became of him? Why did they hide it from him? When he gets back home, his sister tells him – for the first time – the story of his life, and his soul can no longer rest. So he returns to Amsterdam to try and solve the mystery of the baby who disappeared and to trace his own identity. He is also determined to write his best book yet — a novel about his mother, her family, friends, and the leaders of the Amsterdam Jewish community who collaborated with the Nazis. Thus, the tale of Joel’s trip to present-day Amsterdam is bound up with the city’s past and the story of the Jews who believed that “it couldn’t happen here,” and that it was inconceivable that the cruel fate met by the Jews in other lands of Europe was awaiting them too.

Emuna Elon’s novel is a powerful human drama that foregrounds moral dilemmas and courageous decisions, and reads like a psychological-detective thriller.