47 pages • 1 hour read
Yael van der WoudenThe Safekeep
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary
The first part of Chapter 12 is Eva’s diary entries, beginning in January of 1960. The entries reveal that Eva is Jewish and survived the Holocaust as a child. Her father was killed in the concentration camps, and her mother died after the war. Eva works low-paying factory jobs to make ends meet, lives in a tiny apartment, and fantasizes about reclaiming the large house that was stolen from her family when they were taken away to the camps. She remembers the cherished objects she left behind and wonders how they were treated by the family that stole the house. She learns that gentile families have been lying to surviving Jews about what was done with their belongings; they say that the objects were sold so that they can keep and use them. She has friends whose families were forced to sell their houses because mortgages went unpaid when they were in the camps.
One day, she hears a story about a girl who moved back into her stolen home under the pretense of being a maid and quietly stole back items while she worked there. Eva begins to plot to do the same, despite friends’ warnings that she won’t be able to pass for a gentile because of her “Jew face.” She has a friend bleach her hair and longs to hold the objects that her mother held. She remembers going to the house with her mother after the war, her mother demanding to be let back into their home, and the woman who lived there threatening to call the police.
An old neighbor, who is obviously wracked with guilt over her complicity during the Holocaust, reveals to Eva that the family who moved into the house had three children: Louis, Isabel, and Hendrik. After several months, she discovers that a friend knows Louis. The friend describes Louis’s womanizing tendencies, and Eva forms a concrete plan to meet and seduce him. The romance progresses quickly; Louis invites her to move in with him as soon as she hints that she doesn’t have a place to stay. She recognizes Louis’s housemate—a member of the Resistance—but he does not recognize her. Louis tells her that Isabel lives in the family home but that he is set to inherit the house. She thinks that she can marry him and reclaim the house.
Louis invites her to meet his siblings over dinner. She thinks that Isabel is horrible and mean and finds the whole event awful. The next week, when Louis is called away for business, she asks him if she can go stay with Isabel in the country. She is delighted to discover that all her family’s belongings are largely untouched. She claims her mother’s old bedroom, the room where she was born, and quickly sets about taking back objects and mailing them back home. Isabel almost catches her stealing back her father’s letter opener, but she manages to pretend that she had only dropped an earring.
When the affair with Isabel begins, she prays that God will find a way to separate them. The final page of the diary is an inventory of objects that she has recovered and the items that she has not yet recovered, including a menorah and her stuffed hare, Haasje (the diminutive form of “Haas”).
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary
Isabel tries to wrap her mind around everything she learned from the journal. She cuts her hair off during a late-night, emotionally charged moment. She thinks back to her mother’s antisemitic treatment of their local tailor when she was a child. She goes to confront Uncle Karel about how he acquired the house. Karel wonders if she has come to see him because of her new haircut.
When Isabel begins to ask gentle questions about the circumstances of his purchase, he becomes defensive and verbose, despite her not having made any concrete accusations. He insists that they bought the house fairly, that the house was empty, and that it does not matter because the previous family had gone and never come back. He insists that the previous family should have come back to claim the house if they wanted it. Isabel firmly tells Karel that she wants to inherit the house and that Louis will agree to let her have it.
At home, she collects all the objects that Eva has yet to recover. She goes to visit Aunt Rian, who also comments on Isabel’s hair. While they talk, it becomes clear that Rian stole the oven dish from a Jewish neighbor who entrusted it to her when the Holocaust began. Rian is self-congratulatory about refusing to return the dish, refusing to acknowledge that her neighbor had been taken away to a concentration camp. Like Karel, she becomes very defensive.
Isabel visits Hendrik and Sebastian before they leave for France. He and Isabel speak for the first time about him leaving home the first time, and Isabel wants to tell him about her sexuality but stops short. Before she leaves, Sebastian confronts Isabel about her treatment of Hendrik, telling her to be more kind. Upon arriving home, she sees that someone is in the house and rushes in, thinking it is Eva. It is Neelke. Isabel asks Neelke if she has a boyfriend, and Neelke replies in the affirmative. Isabel realizes that Neelke will leave eventually too.
Johan comes to the house one day, angry and demanding to be let in. When Isabel refuses, he insults her hair. He tells her that she has limited romantic options and that she should be careful or else he might leave her. She tells him that he should. He runs around the house, trying to find another way to get in. Isabel shuts all the blinds, turns up the radio, covers her ears, and waits for him to leave. She has nightmares about people trying to get into the house.
Over a meal with Louis, she tells him that he is going to give her the house. When Louis insists that she eventually find a man to settle down with, Isabel tells him that, like Hendrik, she will never marry. She grabs his hand and asks if he understands.
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary
In January, Isabel goes to Amsterdam, having found Eva’s apartment. She rings the bell, and Eva opens the door; her bleached hair has grown out and has returned to its natural curly brown. Eva is apprehensive about Isabel’s presence, convinced that she is there to report her to the police.
Isabel gives Eva back her diary, and Eva tells her that she will fight before giving back the things. Isabel asks why Eva didn’t approach her at the house as a stranger and request her things back openly, convinced that she would have given the things back. Eva finds this premise ridiculous, pointing out that Isabel despised her even when she was visiting family. Isabel asks if their romance was authentic; Eva tells Isabel that she had thought that Isabel truly understood her but that, ultimately, Isabel only saw in Eva what she wanted to see. Isabel asks Eva to come back to the house. Eva tells Isabel to leave the apartment, so she does.
Back in Zwolle, some time later, Isabel is alone in the house. Neelke has married her boyfriend and left. During her daily errands, Isabel observes the old synagogue in town, noticing a piece of Hebrew scripture painted on its side, Isaiah 56:7. She goes home and finds the quote in her Bible: “For my house will be called a house of devotion for all” (251).
That night, there is a knock on the door. Isabel opens it and is startled to see Eva, cold from the walk from the train station. Isabel invites her to sit by the fire. She realizes that she loves Eva. She shows Eva all the items that she has put away in boxes for her. Eva responds vindictively, musing about how terrible it must have been for Isabel to realize that all her things were stolen.
Isabel kneels before Eva and Eva cradles her cheek. Isabel tells her that she has secured inheritance of the house and that Eva should return to live there because it is rightfully hers. She clarifies that she wants Eva to have the house regardless of their relationship status but asks if Eva still wants her. Eva kisses her and tells her that she will never leave if they agree to be together. The novel ends with a scene of them embracing on a snowy morning in their bedroom, followed by the Hebrew script for Isaiah 56:7.
Part 3 Analysis
Part 3 is the briefest in the book but also the densest with information. Subtext that has been present throughout the novel is transformed by van der Wouden into blatant text, solving many of the story’s central mysteries regarding The Nature of Home. There was a broken plate in the garden because it was buried there after the wild hare smashed it at Eva’s cousin’s party. Eva doesn’t have any family to stay with because her family was killed during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The house was fully furnished when Isabel’s family moved in because Eva’s family had left in a rush, fully expecting to return. The woman whom Isabel saw confronting her mother as a child was Eva’s mother. Eva’s journal does the heavy narrative job of answering all these questions, and all that’s left in the remaining chapters is to resolve the interpersonal conflicts between the characters.
Chapter 12 is widely regarded as The Safekeep’s climax because it functions as a plot twist that reframes the entire novel and brings to light an entirely new meaning to the story. Van der Wouden allows this twist to reveal itself gradually, peppering references to Judaism throughout the first few entries and indicating that Eva’s old home is the one that Isabel lives in without saying it explicitly. Eva’s narrative has its own story arc, with a distinct voice and pace. In this way, the diary reads as its own document, independent from the rest of the novel—Isabel later makes references to it like one would with a book.
At the same time, there are striking moments of connection with Isabel’s perspective. For example, when Eva expresses a sense of dissociation from her body—“I do not know it, I never know what it wants. Does anybody know their body truly? I wonder” (190)—it recalls Isabel’s own detachment from her sexuality. Both women have nightmares about their traumatic wartime childhoods. The inventory is another point of connection with Isabel, who, unbeknownst to Eva, has written her own twin list of objects in the house. The addition of the journal thus imbues the entire novel with a sense of intertextuality, a call and response between its two protagonists.
The house itself also represents an important point of connection between Eva and Isabel. Both Eva and Isabel, each in her own way, have a deep emotional attachment to the same home. Isabel’s anxious desire to keep track of objects and her fear of being turned out hint at her subconscious understanding that her family’s possession of the home might not have been truly legitimate, with her fears of dispossession and displacement echoing the real dispossession and displacement Eva and her family experienced. The revelation of Eva’s true identity and connection to the house therefore casts new light on Isabel’s anxieties, gesturing toward the unresolved wartime legacies that continue to haunt the Netherlands and all who took advantage of the country’s Jewish population.
The revelation of how Isabel’s family came to possess the house brings the theme of The Complexities of Civilian Complicity to the forefront. When Isabel confronts both Karel about the house and her aunt Rian about the plate she stole from her Jewish neighbor, she is forced to confront the continual self-justifications and even arrogance that the gentile Dutch still bear toward Dutch Jews. Instead of repenting their complicity, both Karel and Rian seek to blame the victims and become defensive: Karel even insists that the previous family should have come back for the house if they wanted it—an especially cruel statement in light of the fact that Eva’s father was killed in the concentration camps before he could return, while Eva’s mother was threatened and dismissed by Isabel’s mother when she did try to claim the house. Rian’s unrepentant attitude and her callous disregard for her neighbor’s fate further reveal the ways that the family exploited and benefitted from the persecution of their Jewish neighbors, speaking to the extent that the civilian population was complicit in the Holocaust.
As Isabel confronts the ugly truth of this complicity, she makes a choice that contrasts with the self-serving justifications of Karel and Rian. Instead of seeking to hold onto the house for herself, Isabel decides that she must make reparations to Eva by returning everything that her family took from her. Her reunion with Eva features the most blatant, unyielding dialogue of the whole novel. Eva’s words to Isabel, “No one ever knows anything in this country. No one knows where they live, who did what, who went where. Everything is a mystery. Knowledge is illusive” (244), are a sweeping indictment of their entire nation’s response to the genocide. In response, Isabel struggles to form complete sentences. When Eva insists that Isabel never truly understood her, Isabel stutters, “No, I—I did, I do, Eva, I—” (246). In such a speechless state, it is impossible for Isabel to reach the resolution she desires.
It is only after Eva returns to the home, and Isabel returns the objects to her, that they can begin to move forward. While it initially seems strange that they might share the house and its contents, having had competing claims to it for so long, this solution represents the merging of their lives through love. In the book’s final scene, Isabel knows the house “through Eva’s eyes,” indicating a convergence of their once-disparate perspectives. It is, therefore, their ability to share both the house and their lives together that allows for the book’s happy ending.
