Set mostly in Antwerp in the early 1920s, but also in The Hague and Berlin, Gittel is a young Jewish girl living with her rather complicated and argumentative extended family. She is befriended by Lucie Mardell, a twenty-something daughter of a friend of Gittel’s father. She is wealthy and allows Gittel, a talented pianist, to play the family Steinway. Gittel, from who’s adolescent perspective the story unfolds, becomes infatuated with Lucie and leads her on to do something, which has wider, big lesson-learning implications.
This is a short, rather anecdotal and partially autobiographical account of Jewish family life that has been widely regarded since its first publication in Dutch in 1959 as a study of Jewish life in that time. But I found it rather superficial and lacking a focus or a central driving narrative. The story is inescapably shadowed by our knowledge of what dreadful experiences awaited the Jewish people in the next two decades, but this is insufficient to offset the essential weaknesses of the narrative that unfortunately mostly fails to grip this reader.

Mainly picked this up due to comparison with Stoner which is a brilliant book, but this was nothing like it. Sure, a good narrative voice, though the story itself was not interesting and was too meandering. I wouldn't recommend it.

The strangest thing about this rediscovered Dutch novel, first published in 1959, is the comparison I have seen to John William’s Stoner. It is nothing like Stoner, but a rather ordinary coming-of-age tale about a young girl growing up in the 1920s in The Hague and Antwerp. All the tropes of coming-of-age novels are here – the angst, the misunderstandings, the loss of innocence, the passionate attachments - and it’s a relatively interesting portrait of middle-class Jewish Dutch society before the horrors to come. There’s little plot and a fairly disjointed narrative arc and although the writing is sometimes insightful and perceptive, overall I didn’t find it engaging or the central character, Gittel, at all sympathetic. Not a bad book by any means, but not one I enjoyed.