An Empty House     by Marga Minco, Translated by Margaret Clegg Original title: Een leeg huis Published by Peter Owen Publishers Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Hardcover, 160 pages ISBN: 0720607604 List Price: $26.00 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

In some ways this is the sequel to Minco’s Bitter Herbs. Whereas the earlier story dealt with a Jewish family whose members were being picked off one by one by the Nazis in wartime Holland, here we see the sole survivor’s attempts to adjust to life after the war. In terms of style and presentation, however, the two books have little in common. The story line in Bitter Herbs is simple and chronological, although no dates are mentioned. An Empty House is built around three specific dates: Thursday 28 June 1945, Tuesday 25 March 1947, and Friday 21 April 1950.


On the first of these dates the first-person narrator, a Jewish girl called Sepha, is returning to Amsterdam after a month in the country. She meets Yona, who has also been in hiding. Sepha is going back to her boyfriend Mark, Yona has no-one waiting for her. That same evening Yona is in hospital, having fallen into a canal — or did she jump? Two years later, March 1947, we find Sepha in southern France. She has left Mark, who is now her husband, to think things over. Mark turns up, but they don’t really talk. Sepha is still in touch with Yona. Another three years later, 1950, and Sepha and Mark are together again in Amsterdam, although Sepha remains restless and sleeps around. The couple plan to move into a new house. News reaches Sepha that Yona has died: she fell from a train — or did she jump?


This basic story line is complicated, and very much enriched, in two ways. One is the use of flashbacks. While the main story is told by Sepha in the past tense, it is shot through with scenes from the past. These however are given to us in the present tense, as if for Sepha the past is more alive and immediate than the present. The transitions occur suddenly, from one sentence to the next, and cover life in hiding during the war, the relationship with Mark, and the prewar years. They help us to understand the nature of Sepha’s trauma, her desperate attempt to regain some sort of balance.


The other way in which An Empty House gains in complexity and depth is the subtlety with which it is suggested that Yona may be Sepha’s double. Yona, after all, appears out of the blue with her backpack and her features resemble Sepha’s when Sepha looks in Yona’s cracked mirror after the latter’s death. But while Sepha tries to shake off the unbearable weight of the past, Yona carries her burden with her everywhere, until she can no longer cope. Whether or not Sepha’s strategy for survival will prove any more successful is left open at the end.

I began to put the photographs into some sequence, following chronological order as far as possible so that I could see her growing older. Then I looked at the self-portrait. It didn’t look like her at all. But it was already becoming too dark to see it properly. I pulled open the cupboard drawer and found an exercise book under a pile of papers. I took it out. It had a hard brown cover. There was a large letter Y with the Star of David around it on the label. The Y was drawn with black ink, the Star in pencil. Perhaps it was a diary. She might have written in it just yesterday, this morning. At last I’ll get to know what had gone on inside her, what her intentions had been when she left here. But I didn’t open the exercise book. I replaced it under the papers and closed the drawer.

What had she expected from me when she came to me this morning? Hadn’t I given her a chance to say what she had wanted to say? Had she for the umpteenth time wanted to make me feel that I was no less free of guilt? (p. 149, tr. Margaret Clegg)