Israeli writer Yoel Blum’s books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He and his wife Bat-Ami have travelled the world over promoting them. But when his publisher arranges a series of events in Amsterdam, Yoel refuses. The dying wish of his mother, Sonia, had been that he never set foot in Holland.

Yoel’s publisher prevails, and with Bat-Ami’s prodding they are soon enjoying a fancy (not Kosher) hotel in central Amsterdam. When his lectures and events are over he and Bat-Ami visit the Jewish History Museum which preserved remnants of the vibrant Jewish life in Amsterdam pre-Nazi occupation. Of the approximately one hundred and forty thousand Jews of Holland, only about thirty-eight thousand survived the war years. Yoel sees Bat-Ami captivated by an old black and white film of a Jewish wedding. Yoel sits with his wife and suddenly his mother Sonia looks up at the camera with his sister Nettie to one side, and a baby in her arms. But Yoel can clearly see that the blond baby in her arms is not himself.

When Yoel and Bat-Ami return to Israel he calls Nettie and she reluctantly tells him (but not the reader) the story. He is compelled to return to Amsterdam, literally to rewrite his history. With Nettie’s help he finds the neighborhood in Amsterdam where Sonia and Eddy lived, along with Eddy’s friend Martin and his wife Anouk, their son Sebastian, and Anouk’s parents, the wealthy Jewish bankers, the Rosso’s.

Martin had a small shop selling art which is now a real estate office. Eddy worked at the nearby Jewish hospital where Sonia had once been a nurse which is still a medical facility. Yoel finds a small hotel with a room overlooking the back yards of all the neighboring houses. The large unshuttered windows allow Yoel to look in on his neighbors’ lives, a bit of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but here the crime happened decades before the story begins.

Yoel both imagines those lives he sees from his hotel balcony, and the life of Sonia and Eddy, as the persecution of the Jews unfolds. First Jews are not allowed in non-Jewish shops. They lose their jobs in non-Jewish establishments. They are not allowed to go to school, given food rations, made to wear yellow stars. Raids begin and large groups of Jews are taken away by trains to work camps, some to Poland and Germany where they never return.

The narrative between past and present become increasingly fluid. In one paragraph Yoel is observing a mother and her children return home to a basement apartment he imagined Sonia had lived. In the next paragraph Sonia has a visit from a member of the underground, having made the difficult decision to save her children by sending them to be hidden with a Christian family.

We understand that it is only a matter of time before Sonia too will be taken away. The house where her daughter Nettie has been hidden is raided and Nettie is taken to the children’s dormitory with all the other Jewish children about to be sent to the camps. The underground manage to free her from this place and return her to Sonia. The two of them are hiding in their old house, now stripped of furniture and all belongings, not even wanting to turn on a light for fear of discovery. It is excruciating reading and our narrator seems to dissolve as we reach the origin of his story.

I don’t want to be a spoiler, and frankly by the time you get to the end of the story you have a pretty good idea of what has happened. But the process of getting there is worth the read so I won’t spoil it here. I give this book 4.5👍 out of 5👍.