A review by juliebcooper
House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon

3.0

3.5 stars. This story is told in an unusual way: a book within a book/story within a story. Two time points mostly set in Amsterdam: the occupation years of WW2 and the present (which I was dying to figure out because the age of the current day protagonist Yoel, if we use the publication year of the book - 2016- as the general timeframe, makes him roughly 75…. An age which doesn’t seem to match the visual I had of him in the present day storyline. But that’s another matter entirely). In any case, as a few others have pointed out in their reviews, this started out slowly, and I almost gave up a few times but finally it picked up steam (or I got used to the style of writing) and the second half of the story was much more urgent and drew me in.

This is a very different story of Holocaust resistance, survival and trauma, based on research and interviews with Dutch Jews who survived.