The Safekeep explores political themes through a sapphic romance. However, it neither satisfyingly interrogates its political tensions nor weaves a compelling love story. The point of failure is the same for both aspects of the novel: the mutual understanding between the two main characters is just not believable.
The protagonist is a small-minded and reclusive Dutch woman, Isabel, who cares for her family home like a shrine: her parents are dead and her brothers have moved out, leaving her alone to tend the garden and obsess over the silverware. Early hints suggest to us that there is more to the house than Isabel would prefer us to know: her family moved into it during World War II fully furnished and touched with signs of its former inhabitants. We later learn that it was vacated because the Jewish family who lived there was sent to a concentration camp, then evicted for non-payment of the mortgage.
Isabel’s brother finds himself needing to travel internationally, and places his new girlfriend, Eva, in the “family home” while he is gone. Isabel treats her horribly, mocking her manners and her appearance and controlling her actions, while Eva remains peppy and full of life and keeps trying to break through Isabel’s hard exterior shell — a manic pixie dream girl, but queer. Because Isabel lacks any redeeming qualities, Eva’s patience and interest in her appears unmotivated. When they suddenly initiate a romantic relationship, it feels unearned, inscrutable, forced. Romantic chemistry springs from two hearts recognizing each other, whereas in this novel, hatred melts into love without that moment of genuine mutual discovery. The sensuously written passages of hazy, heady new love felt flat. What did each woman see in the other?
In the third act, the reader learns that Eva is the daughter of the dispossessed Jewish family, and the lone survivor of the camps in her family. She concocts a Hollywoodesque scheme of seducing Isabel’s brother to reclaim her home, or at the very least, reclaim some of her family’s dinnerware. Conveniently for the plot, the scheme is surprisingly successful, and Eva’s sojourn at her family’s former home is interrupted only by Isabel’s stumbling across her diary, where Eva had recorded the reclaimed dinnerware.
This reveal explains Eva’s patient persistence in befriending Isabel, but a mystery remains for the reader: what was this intense love actually founded on? We are told that Eva really did inexplicably love the abusive Isabel — it was not a mere ploy. Despite their relationship being founded on deception, we are told Isabel still loves Eva. The two women work out their pain in a series of emotional confrontations that explore the hurt of being kicked out of one’s home and not belonging anywhere. Isabel maneuvers to get the house put in her name — rather than her brother’s — and invites Eva to live with her. And so they live together happily ever after. The closing words of the book are in Hebrew: “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7).
The novel is a study of dispossession. Published in 2024 and written by an author who spent her childhood in Israel and who has spoken about her opposition to the Israeli government, it is impossible to read this story without thinking of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. Isabel’s fierce attachment to her house as her ancestral right despite the living dispossessed inhabitant’s desperate desire to return home renders her a symbolic stand-in for Israel. On the other hand, Eva’s suffering in the Holocaust and in the callousness and antisemitism of the Netherlands post-War is distinctly Jewish. The Israel-Palestine conflict is thus transfigured into one between Israel and Jews. The resolution of this political tension is shallow and Utopian: if the two sides simply fall in love they can share a home together.
But where does the mutual recognition for this unification come from? The answer is as unclear as the basis for Isabel and Eva’s love.
I could see an alternative restructuring of the story in which Eva’s motivations are revealed earlier on. Rather than reserving her intentions for a climactic reveal towards the end, her affections for Isabel could then be developed more transparently. Perhaps the romance could grow as they tend the garden together, connecting with each other as they connect with their shared land and construct something new. I would find it more believable from a character perspective, and perhaps from a political perspective, than an inexplicable attraction between two souls.
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