Overview

Based on select writings from an exceptional Amsterdam archive containing more than two thousand Dutch diaries from World War II, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before. Nina Siegal, an accomplished journalist and novelist, weaves together excerpts from the daily journals of collaborators, resistors, and the persecuted—a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives—into a braided nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as individuals experienced it day by day. Siegal provides the context, both historical and personal, while she tries to make sense of her own relationship to this past. As a “second-generation survivor” born and raised in New York, she attempts to understand what it meant for her mother and maternal grandparents to live through the war in Europe in those times. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did 75 percent of the Dutch Jewish community perish in the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower? How did this square with the narratives of Dutch resistance she had heard so much about, and in what way did it relate to the famed Dutch tolerance? Searching and singular, The Diary Keepers takes us into the lives of seven diary writers and follows their pasts into the present, through interviews with those who preserved and inherited these diaries. Along the way, Siegal investigates the nature of memory and how the traumatic past is rewritten again and again.

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9780008447694

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Reviews

Praise for Nina Siegal's The Anatomy Lesson: 'A literary page-turner that captures a story behind a masterpiece. [Siegal's] talent is in exploring the wrenching emotion of loss and the price that's paid for trying to understand human life.' Oprah Book of the Week, Editor's Pick 'Siegal succeeds in the task she has set for herself - to transmute her material into a work of art.' The New Yorker 'Siegal's fascinating narrative conveys the pomp, graft, bustle and rough justice of 17th-century Holland through a multitude of voices.' The New York Times Book Review 'Siegal sets her splendid, gory second novel in 1632 in Amsterdam, where a thief's execution occasions a celebration, evoking bloodlust throughout the city on Justice Day. ...Through masterful use of subtle details, embroidered into beautiful writing, Siegal suggests that art and violence often intertwine.' Publishers Weekly 'Virtually every sentence is drenched in the atmosphere of 17th-century Amsterdam. We feel as if we are walking at Rembrandt's side, in a cell awaiting the execution of a thief, rushing through the streets with the condemned's lover in hopes of saving him. This is a novel to be absorbed for its rich evocation of a single day when one man died and another rose to fame for his art... Brilliant.' Historical Novel Society, Editor's Choice

Author Information

Nina Siegal is a writer and journalist, with a history of writing for the theater. A LITTLE TROUBLE WITH THE FACTS, her debut novel, is a hard-boiled satire set in late 1990s New York and was a 2005 finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship from Wilkes University. Nina received her MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and her B.A. from Cornell University.

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