Elena Bowes

I spoke with fantastic writer Yael van der Wouden about her award-winning debut novel The Safe Keep. A psychological thriller mixed with erotica, revenge and a subtle incisive angle on Hitler’s war, The Safe Keep captivated me from the get-go. I’m not the only one. The book won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, as well as was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. Only six books made the shortlist, and this was the first time a Dutch author was chosen. The Safe Keep was named a best book of 2024 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, LA Times Time Magazine, the Economist, the Sunday Times and a host of others. In short, it’s worth a read.

Think Daphne de Moyer’s, Rebecca or Ian McEwan’s Atonement with a twist. The 258-page novel centres on a nearly 30-year-old woman named Isabel, living in a small town in the eastern part of the Netherlands. It’s 1961, sixteen years after the end of WWII. Isabelle is a recluse taking care of the house that she and her two brothers and late mother fled to during the war.

Isabel has no friends, no life really. Her weeks consist of mundane errands -going to the butcher, the baker, visiting her banker to see about her allowance. She has two brothers, Henrik and Louis who left home years ago and who rarely visit. She resents them for their carefree life while she dutifully maintains the house, and everything in it from the crockery to the curtains. Her younger brother Henrik fled as a teenager when their rigid cold mother disapproved of his sexuality. He lives with his Algerian boyfriend, Sebastian.

And the older brother Louis  is a bit of a womanizer, falling in and out of love easily. Most annoying to Isabel, Louis is set to inherit the house once he marries and settles down.

Isabel’s world is upended when Louis brings his latest girlfriend, Ava, to live at the house, one long hot summer while he travels on a work project.

Isabelle can’t stand Ava. Her badly dyed hair, her sloppy ways, getting up late, going to bed late, the way she touches everything in the house and asks so many questions. Who is this annoying woman? And then Isabel starts to suspect Ava of stealing. A teaspoon has gone missing, then a plate, she becomes obsessed watching Ava’s every move.

And that’s just part one in a three-part book. Below is an edited, condensed version of our conversation. You can listen to the full interview here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author.

Elena: Yael, welcome to the show. I’m so glad you could make it.

Yael: Oh, I’m thrilled to be here. That was a great introduction. I don’t think I’ve been able to summarize the book better than that., so I might steal parts of it.

Elena: Very funny. I read that you wrote this book in just six months, that the idea for the novel came to you between two family funerals in the Netherlands. Can you tell us where the seed to the novel started at and your process of writing the Safe Keep? Had the ideas been percolating for a while?

 I went to two funerals and in between them, I looked out over the fields and the idea came to me. When I was a kid, what I would do when I couldn’t fall asleep is I would do mind theatre. I would imagine putting the VCR on and pressing play on my favorite Disney movie. And then I would just play the whole movie in my head from beginning to end, or as far as I could get before falling asleep. I would do this every single night. Most often it was 101 Dalmatians.

Elena: Great movie

I would just go into the latest scene of a movie or a story that I made up myself and disappear into that. And I think that’s something I reached for in the grief between the two funerals.

I think I was looking for a story that would distract me wholly. And the idea of Isabel and the house and a stranger coming in took hold of me. The truth is that the themes have been percolating for years. The frustration I’d felt with how the Dutch memorialize their history but also questions of complicity and culpability throughout history. These are conversations that I’ve been having for years and years and years as an academic, but also as a reader. And then all of it came together quickly after that,

Elena: So, when you moved to Holland from Israel, how old were you?

I was 10. My father is Dutch. Hence my last name.

Elena: What was your experience as a Jewish person moving from Israel to the Netherlands?

At this moment in time, I hesitate to talk about my childhood experiences. because I’m always afraid that it’s going to be taken out of context or seen in the wrong light when I compare Israel to the Netherlands.  I hesitate to speak of Israel with any kind of nostalgia, especially in this current climate because I do want to be careful of creating nostalgia around Israel and its politics.

(Having said that), there was an intense cultural backlash moving to a part of a country where I was one of a handful of Jewish children, I think maybe max five, and I mean, the other ones were my sisters and cousins.

I experienced quite a lot of strange, funny, but also painful, antisemitic moments there. I have this one memory of walking across the playground, just outside of high school, and this girl and this guy, they were just hardcore making out. They were just going for it. Leaning against the bike rack. And then the girl removes the guy’s face from her face, like you can almost hear the smooching sound of it, and she shouts across the yard, in Dutch…. ‘Are you that Jew girl?’

Elena: Wow. What did you say?

You say yes, and then you keep walking. There were more intense moments of children who I believe didn’t quite know what they were doing or had decided to be edgy, and would carve swastikas into lockers or tables, or would draw cartoons of me and then slip them so I could see them.

Elena: Right.

Not only did I go from a place where I didn’t have to think much about my identity as a Jewish person to but suddenly, I had to also explain that identity to a community who’s only understanding of Jewishness was the Holocaust or Anne Frank or from antisemitic tropes, the bread and butter of Dutch storytelling sometimes.

It was a whiplash in many ways, going from knowing a language and knowing your friends to trying to figure out how popularity works in a place where you don’t understand the cultural conventions.

Elena: You set your novel in 1961. Why?

 I grew up in a time and space where the war was absolutely and completely over, and yet it kept on creeping up in strange ways. In anecdotes, in conversations, in remnants in the city where Jews lived or at the synagogue where they used to worship. These places had either been reshaped or emptied out. And in the Dutch language there’s remnants of Yiddish from the people who used to speak Yiddish.

 I felt like I grew up in a post-war environment, but the ghost of the war was always present. It  was me. I was the ghost, the person who reminded people. I wanted to place the novel in 1961 because I wanted to explore that.

I think also we have an association with the sixties. We have this idea it’s the era of liberation, excess, creating a new identity that isn’t overshadowed by the war.

And then to then follow a character Isabel who knows no excess and no liberation, and then to slowly pull her apart seemed fascinating to me.

Elena: Yeah, that was very good. Did you really write the book in six months?

 I did.

Elena: Amazing.

This is what I always say to my students. You must remember, before this novel came, there were many others that were not written in six months and never saw the light of day. And it’s not that I woke up one day and thought ‘I want to be a writer’. Let’s see what I can do. And then sat behind the computer and it rolled out of me. Years and years of attempting. I’d never sent anything out because I was never satisfied with anything I’d written so far. When the idea for the Safe Keep came to me, I was writing a different novel, and it felt terrible. I felt like I was cheating on the other novel.

Also, the six month (was preceded by) four months creating the outlines, putting the plot together. A lot of people have asked me about whether I just started writing and saw where it took me.

 The thought of that makes me want to sweat. It makes me so nervous. The idea of starting to write without knowing where I’m going to go. I’m an intense planner when it comes to writing. Not only did I have outlines upon outlines, I had color-coded flashcards.

Elena: Wow.

 I wanted to create as much scaffolding as possible, including bits of dialogue, bits of movement. I already had certain scenes a little bit written out, so by the time that I started writing, it was basically just colouring in (the story).

When I write, I don’t want to think about the plot so that I can immerse myself in the language I want, the cadence, the rhythm. I create the plot and the outlining so I can experiment with language.

Elena: So, you’re free?

  I’m free of the plot. Yes

Elena: Can you tell us a bit about Isabel’s conflicted relationship with her two brothers, Henrik and Louis.

Of course. Henrik left the house when he was 16. His mother found out about his affair with a piano teacher, and she gave him an ultimatum: Stay here and never do this again or leave. Of course, he left. He rebuilds his relationship with Isabel eventually, but Isabel will always. associate his love life with abandonment.

Elena: Mm.

 Her brother desired something and that something was more important to him than staying there with her, him keeping her company, being loyal to her.

Andbon the other hand, we have Louis the oldest who has never really understood Isabel, has never given her a lot of attention or time. He too has this habit of putting his love life first. He always has a new girlfriend, and he always brings her no matter what.

He doesn’t quite consider the sensitivity of a situation, the nuance of it. For example, he brings a random girlfriend with him to his mother’s funeral.

Elena: I loved that detail.

 Isabel is annoyed with it because now that girlfriend is in all the pictures, and no one even remembers her name. So, through her brothers, Isabel associates love and sexuality with selfishness and abandonment. And she tries to rebuild the sibling relationship by instituting these monthly or bi-monthly dinners.

But each time that they meet up, it seems to reaffirm to her how self-involved her siblings are, and how she’s the only one who truly cares about what matters, the house and their mother’s legacy. Of course, when she then comes to find her own desire, she has to work through a lot of those feelings herself to be able to justify that for herself.

Elena:  Was it easy for you to write suspense or did you have to go back and edit out things to make it sparer?

Yes. I love writing suspense.  I love trying to figure out what creates tension and what breaks tension, especially with a voice like Isabel who’s not allowed to have any self-reflection. If she had the ability to think about her actions, or her desire or interiority in any way, this book could not have existed, right?

Elena: True

 There would’ve been no tension. So, I needed to create a voice for Isabel where she didn’t have access to herself, and we as readers don’t have access to her.

I would write some dialogue and then be like, oh no, she understands too much. I would go back and have to edit a lot of it away or create these half thoughts, these unfinished thoughts.

Elena: exactly

She doesn’t only halt continuously when she speaks, but also in her internal monologues. In some of the scenes that we see through her eyes, the knowledge is constantly hinted at and taken away. And this is also how Dutch society works. You are given hints of something, and it’s taken away, and you’re not encouraged to think about it too much.

It’s just snatches of realization that are then taken away. It was very interesting indeed to see what creates tension and what releases tension and when I needed to really pull it as tight as possible. But you cannot go on with high tension forever. You need to have moments of relaxation or hope or something else. And to see exactly how much I could make sure that you do want to continue reading, that you don’t get tired of the heightened emotion of it all.

Elena: As you’re writing the book, are you thinking of it a bit like a film?

 Now we’re back to 101 Dalmations. My parents both worked in film.  Before I knew how to write, my parents had taught me how to make little animations, like in book margins. The pages taught me how to do a storyboard because if I wanted to make an animation, I had to think beforehand. It’s not like a drawing or a painting, you have to think of your character and movement. I’m an avid film lover too.

Elena: What would you like readers to take away from this book?

 I wrote this book for myself. I was thinking a lot about what I wanted from society and what I was unhappy with. And it came from a place of feeling undesired. At the heart of prejudice, marginalization, and looking away from suffering is indifference.

Elena: Mmmm.

 And the opposite of indifference isn’t tolerance or isn’t charity, it’s desire, saying, I was indifferent to you, I was repulsed by you even, and now I desire you. I wanted to take a character from beginning to end and see how she could start with indifference or repulsion even and bring her slowly step by step into desire.

I wanted it to end on this idea that there are  little steps that we might find ourselves (doing) as part of a prejudicial system. It’s these tiny little moments of indifference and thoughtless action that slowly take us  into a place where we are complicit. We are part of a larger evil. And I wanted to chip at that system just a little bit. So, I think, if readers take away anything, it’ll be that. Find desire where you did not expect desire.

Elena: Well, thank you Yael. I know we’re out of time. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your making the time.

July, 2025