In this audiobook, Israeli novelist Yoel Blum visits the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, where he stumbles upon a video image of his family during WWII. His shock at seeing another boy in the footage compels him to dig into his family’s past. Narrator Jonathan Davis artfully portrays Yoel’s intelligent introspection as he uncovers stunning truths about his family and racial heritage. Davis’s gravitas lends credence to Yoel’s emotional journey, and to the deplorable persecution of Jews in Holland during the war. Yoel parlays his research into a new novel, and passages from his book about his mother’s endeavors in Amsterdam in the 1940s are interspersed with Yoel’s own experiences in contemporary times. Transitions between timeframes aren’t well delineated, resulting in a muddled storyline—but a compelling listen, nonetheless. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
House on Endless Waters: A Novel
Narrated by Jonathan Davis
Emuna ElonUnabridged — 10 hours, 9 minutes
House on Endless Waters: A Novel
Narrated by Jonathan Davis
Emuna ElonUnabridged — 10 hours, 9 minutes
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Overview
In the tradition of The Invisible Bridge and The Weight of Ink, “a vibrant, page-turning family mystery” (Jennifer Cody Epstein, author of Wunderland) about a writer who discovers the truth about his mother's wartime years in Amsterdam, unearthing a shocking secret that becomes the subject of his magnum opus.
Renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to promote his books, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Historical Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon footage portraying prewar Dutch Jewry and is astonished to see the youthful face of his beloved mother staring back at him, posing with his father, his older sister...and an infant he doesn't recognize.
This unsettling discovery launches him into a fervent search for the truth, shining a light on Amsterdam's dark wartime history-the underground networks that hid Jewish children away from danger and those who betrayed their own for the sake of survival. The deeper into the past Yoel digs up, 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.
Part family mystery, part wartime drama, House on Endless Waters is “a rewarding meditation on survival” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) and a “deeply immersive achievement that brings to life stories that must never be forgotten” (USA TODAY).
Editorial Reviews
Praise for House on Endless Waters
“House on Endless Waters is extraordinary—a vibrant, page-turning family mystery that not only carries us deep into Amsterdam’s little-explored wartime history, but into the fascinating, complex and often painful process by which history is crafted into story.” —Jennifer Cody Epstein, internationally bestselling author of Wunderland and The Painter of Shanghai
“Intricately woven and lushly layered...With achingly exquisite, delicate prose, Elon explores the creative mind’s power to reimagine a life and memory’s power to recognize truth. An unforgettable read.” —Lynda Cohen Loigman, author of The Two-Family House and The Wartime Sisters
“House on Endless Waters is a haunting and lyrical meditation on who we are and where we come from, on how our past shapes our present and our art. Emuna Elon’s gorgeously intricate novel is beautifully written and moving.” —Jillian Cantor, bestselling author of The Lost Letter and In Another Time
“Emuna Elon has given us an elegant, eloquent novel—a story in which time and language melt to reveal truths that could be told in no other way. House on Endless Waters is at once an Escher print of a tale and devastatingly, inescapably real.” —Rachel Kadish, bestselling author of The Weight of Ink
"I read this book in excitement and wonder. It's not only a touching and fascinating book, but a sophisticated one as well." —Amos Oz
In this audiobook, Israeli novelist Yoel Blum visits the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, where he stumbles upon a video image of his family during WWII. His shock at seeing another boy in the footage compels him to dig into his family’s past. Narrator Jonathan Davis artfully portrays Yoel’s intelligent introspection as he uncovers stunning truths about his family and racial heritage. Davis’s gravitas lends credence to Yoel’s emotional journey, and to the deplorable persecution of Jews in Holland during the war. Yoel parlays his research into a new novel, and passages from his book about his mother’s endeavors in Amsterdam in the 1940s are interspersed with Yoel’s own experiences in contemporary times. Transitions between timeframes aren’t well delineated, resulting in a muddled storyline—but a compelling listen, nonetheless. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
★ 2019-10-14
A celebrated Israeli novelist's visit to Amsterdam, the city where he was born, triggers the search for his origins that—unknowingly—he has been waiting to make his entire life.
Paying thoughtful homage to the Jews of Amsterdam, trapped in the Nazis' inexorable vise of persecution, Israeli writer Elon (If You Awaken Love, 2007, etc.) has composed a story of love, loss, and yearning, expressed through the creation of a novel within a novel. Her central character, writer Yoel Blum, was instructed by his mother never to visit the city from which she, Yoel, and his sister fled, but after her death he makes the trip and accidentally sees a clip of prewar film that opens up questions of identity he feels compelled to explore. So Yoel settles in Amsterdam, in a tacky hotel right near the hospital where he was born, and begins to accumulate notes for a novel through which he will try to make sense of the past. This second story features Sonia, a mother, and her two children, Nettie and Leo, characters who both animate Yoel's knowledge of the past and accompany him into the present as he wanders the streets, accumulating information, acquaintances, and atmosphere, while slowly coming to terms with the truth. Heavily shadowed with the creeping horrors of the Holocaust—in particular the heart-wrenching choice to hide children and the consequences of that choice—the novel is given weight by its focus on Yoel's psychology and the mood of a beautiful capital flowing with symbolic dark water. Lyrically phrased and often powerfully visual, the novel has a slow pace, unlike other, perhaps more conventional war stories. However, this deeply felt tale offers a rewarding meditation on survival and on digesting the emotional burdens freely or unknowingly carried.
Blurring the edges between history and fiction, this achingly mournful work impresses with its grave empathy.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940173887399 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2020 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
One after another the people are swallowed up into the plane to Amsterdam, one after another after another. Yoel is approaching the aircraft’s door but the flow of passengers is suddenly halted by somebody, a woman in an orange windbreaker, who has planted herself in the doorway of the Boeing 737 and refuses to step inside. Yoel’s thoughts are already with the new novel he has decided to write, and he thinks about this woman and asks himself which of his new characters would be capable of admitting to the primal, naked fear that besets every mortal on entering the flying trap called an airplane. Who would volunteer to disrupt with her body the “everything’s alright” façade and violate the sacred alrightness to which people clutch so they won’t have to admit that everything is truly chaotic.
From his place in the line, Yoel can see only the woman’s back. Even through the orange plastic of her windbreaker, he can see how tense her muscles are, and over the shoulders of the people in front of him he discerns the beads of perspiration breaking out on the back of her neck and around her ears. The line starts burbling irritably; people peek anxiously at their boarding pass for flight such-and-such, clutching the rectangular pieces of paper as if they were an assurance that the plane will eventually take off. Then from out of nowhere appears a man in a resplendent uniform, with gray hair and an air of authority, who introduces himself as the purser and puts a fatherly arm around the stricken passenger’s shoulders. As he gently takes her aside, the plane continues filling up, and as Yoel passes them he hears him telling her, Believe me, my dear, I have anxious passengers on every flight, and everything’s alright. I promise I’ll come and hold your hand during takeoff.
When he’s invited overseas to promote his books, he and Bat-Ami usually fly business class, thus sparing him from physical contact with the multitudes of other passengers and from being subjected to their multitudes of looks. Since this time he’s flying on his own, and mainly because he’s paying for his ticket out of his own pocket, he decided to fly economy and so now all he can do is slide into his seat as discreetly as humanly possible. Just look straight ahead and downward, he reminds himself, just straight ahead and downward. Don’t raise your eyes or look to the side lest your eyes meet those of somebody who might recognize you. And be very wary of people who have already recognized you and are trying to get your attention, and of the ones you can hear saying to each other, that’s Yoel Blum. Or, there’s that writer. Or, there’s that famous guy, the one with the cap. Come on, remind me what his name is.
It has been only a week since his first trip to Amsterdam and the reception, held in his honor by his Dutch publisher, that was attended by local luminaries from the fields of literature and the media. Only a week since he and Bat-Ami had wandered through the crowds of tall people in the city of bicycles and canals, and strolled through streets, squares, palaces, and museums. In the evening, exhausted and ravenous, they went to the publisher’s beautiful home on Apollo Avenue in the old southern part of Amsterdam, but had to make do with a meal of carrot and cucumber crudités: the fare on the tables was rich and varied, but here too, as at many festive events held in his honor all over the world, it was clearly evident that their hosts hadn’t imagined that in these enlightened times there were still civilized people who observed the ancient Biblical dietary laws.
Before the second part of the literary event began, the Israeli guest was asked to sit on a carved chair in the center of the Dutch living room next to the stylized Dutch cabinet on whose shelves Dutch delftware of white porcelain decorated in blue was arranged, and facing the large, wide Dutch window overlooking a canal scattered with flickering reflections. His audience sat facing him, waiting for him to answer his red-cheeked host’s question on the difference between Israeli writers categorized as writers of the generation of the establishment of the State of Israel and those known—like Mr. Blum, and I hope it’s alright if we simply call you Yoel—as writers of the new wave.
The past cannot be hidden. Yoel pronounced the reply he always provides to this question as he crosses his legs and looks pleasantly at his audience. I believe it’s impossible to write Israeli literature without referring either directly or indirectly to the archeological tell on which the State of Israel flourishes, the shores of which are lapped by its new and old waves alike.
Attentive faces nodded their understanding and perhaps even empathy.
Attentive faces always nod their understanding and perhaps even their empathy.
However, he emphasized in the dramatic crescendo to which his voice always rises at this point, contemporary Israeli writers are first and foremost contemporary Israeli writers. I myself hope that my writing does not wallow in the mire of the past, but carries my soul and the souls of my readers to what is the present and to what will be in the future.
The game went on. In the way that people ask him everywhere, the Dutch asked if the characters populating his books are typical Israelis. And he replied, the way he replies everywhere, that in his view, his characters are universal.
For a moment, he thought about deviating from his custom and telling them, this particular audience, how hard he works in his writing to refine his characters so that each of them is Everyman. In each movement to capture all the movements which have ever been and will ever be. To formulate the core of the words, their very core.
Like every writer’s characters, he said as he always does, my characters, too, live and act in a reality I am closely acquainted with. As a writer who lives in the Israeli reality, it is only natural that my characters are connected with that reality as well. But the stories I tell about these characters tell about Man wherever he breathes, about Man wherever he loves, about Man wherever he yearns.
The publisher’s red cheeks flushed even more deeply as he read to his guests from the New York Times book review: “It is hardly surprising that Yoel Blum’s books have been translated into more than twenty languages and that he has been awarded some of the most prestigious literature prizes. Yoel Blum is a magician, the wave of whose wand turns every human anecdote into the nucleus of every reader’s personal story.”
The color of the Dutch cheeks turned a deep purple as he continued reading: “You pick up a Yoel Blum novel and are assured of it revealing your deepest secret: the secret whose existence you weren’t even aware of.”
A few more familiar, unavoidable questions, and Yoel already estimated that the evening was drawing to its expected conclusion.
But then he was asked an unexpected question by a man introduced to him earlier as a local journalist by the name of Neumark, or maybe Neuberg.
If I’m not mistaken, called the questioner from his seat at the right-hand edge of the circle of chairs. If I’m not mistaken—Mr. Blum, Yoel—you were born here, in Amsterdam?
A stunned silence engulfed the room. Yoel too was shocked, since to the best of his knowledge, this fact did not appear in any printed or virtual source dealing with him and his history. He tried to recall the journalist’s name. Neustadt? Neumann? Is he Jewish?
As he did so, he heard himself calmly answering: That is correct. Technically, I was indeed born in Amsterdam. But my family immigrated to Israel when I was a baby, and so I’ve always regarded myself as a native Israeli.
Afterward he managed to divert the talk from his personal history back to the collective Israeli one and say a few more words about Hebrew literature in these changing times. But it seemed that the matter of his Dutch origins had been placed in the center of the circle and that none of those present could ignore it. Yoel presumed that they expected him to provide further biographic details, aside from the one already provided by Neuhaus, or Neufeld, according to which the famous Israeli writer is a scion of an old Jewish-Amsterdam family uprooted in the wake of the events of World War Two.
They couldn’t have imagined that the Israeli writer himself knew no further details about it either.
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