Op klompen troch de dessa by Hylke Speerstra

Abstract

68 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 There are several technical points that mar this work, the first of which can be attributed to neither the author nor the translator. Columbia University Press made the inexplicable decision to set the work in a sans serif font, which is difficult to read. Second, each page has a light gray circle in the center, echoing the one formed by the cover, that further distracts from the text. Third, each of the six chapters has, sequentially at the top of the first page, several of the steps necessary to fold an origami crane. There is certainly a connection between the atomic bombings and origami cranes, but this seems overly precious and disconnected from the literature. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Hylke Speerstra. Op klompen troch de dessa. Gorredijk, Netherlands. Bornmeer. 2014. isbn 9789056153359 Friesland’s best-selling author has done it again; this time a collection of stories from survivors of the ill-advised and illfated attempt by the Dutch government to maintain colonial control of Indonesia. Shortly after the end of World War II, the Dutch sent one hundred thousand of their young men, many of them still in their teens, to gruesome combat in the jungles and rice fields of Indonesia. They went illprepared and ill-equipped. (The book’s title alludes to that: In wooden shoes through the rice fields.) They left behind siblings, parents, girlfriends, fiancées, and dreams of a future. Led to believe that they were fighting for a just cause, they discovered that they had been betrayed, that they were rather engaged in a guerilla warfare that would continue to haunt them with its shame and guilt. Hylke Speerstra, as he had done with Dutch emigrants who after World War II scattered across the globe (Cruel Paradise, 2005), searched out survivors of this dark chapter in Dutch history and gathered their stories. The story, for example, of Ale van der Meer who in the Depression years worked for a pittance, was picked up by the Germans in World War II and sent to a forced-labor camp (from which he walked back at war’s end weighing less than a hundred pounds), was pressed into military service and sent to Indonesia not long after that, became part of a firing squad carrying out executions, and shot a suspected sniper who turned out to be a young lad of twelve or thirteen: memories that tore at his soul the rest of his life. Survivors break their long silence in these stories. In the words of one: “I’m World Literature in Review eager to break the silence. I always kept it to myself, and it was as if I had built a wall around myself. But at last the wall collapses .” And the painful memories surface: of mass killings, including women and children; beheadings; finding the shallow graves of thousands of fallen young soldiers ; officers without a conscience sending their men into war-crime scenarios; seeing best buddies die; leaving behind lovers and their children when a political settlement was finally reached and they returned home. But what happened in the jungles of Indonesia came home with them, and they would never be the same. More than five thousand did not come home. Speerstra visits those stories, too, of bereaved parents whose grief never went away, or of fiancées who waited in vain. And though there is an inevitable similarity running through these stories, no two are the same. Speerstra’s storytelling powers are fully exercised here by varying the narrative techniques and by letting each subject tell his story in his own unique way. Characteristically, the author allows the stories their emotional dimension. In many of these stories, he listens to the heartbeat of a lost generation; in recording them, he makes sure that the war and its cost are no longer forgotten. Henry J. Baron Calvin College Goli Taraghi. The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. Sara Khalili, tr. New York. W. W. Norton. 2015 (©2013). isbn 9780393063332 Goli Taraghi, a renowned Iranian female author, now in her seventies, has lived in Iran, the US, and France and has written and published both before the Islamic Revolution...