Chaja Polak

As a child, the Dutch writer Chaja Polak survived the war in hiding. Her parents were deported. Her father was murdered in Dachau, but her mother survived Auschwitz. After the war they were reunited and lived in Amsterdam.

Polak's latest novel, Het verdriet van de vrede, puiblished in 2023, is about four Jewish women and a boy who survived the war. They represent different generations belonging to one family, the Sterngolds. Judit, the oldest, the wife of the oldest son, Selina, wife of Max, show more and Roza, children of the second generation, and Dima, the son of Dora, in the third generation. They are coldly welcomed into their pre-war home, which is stripped of possessions. They live a melancholy life, pondering the past, and the dear family members they have lost.

Guilt is one of the most important themes of the novel, the guilt of having survived. Some of the men declined to escape and flee, choosing to stay with the others, and perished.

Het verdriet van de vrede is one of the most finely balanced and beautiful novels of Chaja Polak. show less

Wachten op de schemering is a requiem for her son, who died in 2006. Chaja Polak is mostly known for writing stories and novels about the holocaust, books full of grief, and often helplessness. Wachten op de schemering is also about grief and helplessness, but unlike her other books, this story is told with vehemence and passion.

Chaja Polak writes sensitive stories about the devastating experiences of Jewish people during the Second World War. Stenen halzen is a novel about grief. It tells the intertwines stories of four women of different generations. It is a beautiful book, although the story line is not always clear.

In Over de grens (Enl: "Across the border"), relations are the result of fate: the fateful event of the holocaust. The survivors are burdened by the guilt and the question whether they really love their partners or whether their bond is the result of circumstance. As a result, they cannot truly come together. There remains a barrier, a boundary.

Over de grens (2001), the fifth novel by Chaja Polak consists of seven short stories, set in 1961, 1965, 1968, 1973, 1979, 1990 and 1992. Rosa van show more Esso appears in each of these stories, although she is not always the main character.

In the first story, Rosa is 13 years old, traveling in northern France with her mother. There, in the family of Levensky, maried to Maria Pia, in whose home he survived the war, she meets Manuel, their adopted son. Years later, Rosa lives with Manuel in Rome. Marriages are often unfulfilled, such as in the case of Mees Visser and Bregje Hoppe. Mees meets Rosa in the home of a friend, and she reminds him of the girl he loved in his youth, Judith. Judith did not survive the camps. In his heart, Mees has always remained young. This young Mees is still longing, looking for Judith. He thinks Judith has come back in the form of Rosa. When Rosa is 45, towards the end of the novel, she visits Berlin. There she discovers that, although her parents survived the war, they carried a big secret.

The difficulty in reading Over de grens is that the stories are so fragmented. Over de grens is a novel: the seven stories add up to more than seven. However, the seven stories form diachronic slices of Rosa's life history. Each episode reveals nuances in the relations of people, but there is no overarching plot which drives a story. Besides, the characters are all fairly "flat". There is no development in most of the characters other than aging, and there is no development of relationships, even in the case of Rosa, the main character. However, fragmentation and disorientation are parts of the life experience of holocaust survivors.

The stories in Over de grens are more descriptive than reflective. They describe the characters lives at various moments. The past is a factual part of their lives, but whatever happened in the past is buried in the past, both to the reader and to the characters. The horror of the holocaust is not experienced by most of the characters in the novel. Their experience with the horror is only indirect. Over de grens documents the life experience of Jewish people who live with the memory, but not the burden. show less