The rain is pelting down as as I take my first steps around Amsterdam,  the Venice of the North as some have referred to it, and with reason. Amsterdam wins the canal contest by 165 to 150 and the bridges by 1,281 to 409.  Nor do I think any of the Venice canals open to let ships pass.  I’ll be watching for the great steel ballet with interest, especially to see if any of the new big-masted sailing ship prototypes are plying the waters.  Venice is  older, though.  One number has its founding in 421 with a population boom shortly after, coinciding with Attila the Hun’s ravaging of the area. Amsterdam claims 1275 as the year of its founding though  hardy communally minded folk took over swamp and marsh, learned to control the waters and live amongst them much earlier.  As a recent Dutch water-control expert said after a visit to Hurricane Sandy struck New York ~ it will be hard for Americans to give up their stubborn individualism and deal with the region wide problem of rising seas and drenching downpours.  The Dutch, and Venetians, learned long ago that one man with a shovel can’t do much about in-rushing tides, or out-sweeping rivers. Community is in the birthright.

A nice collection of Amsterdam fiction was an appetizer as I arrived.  Whereabouts Press, as it has done for so many cities and regions of the world, has put together a good volume of contemporary writing, aimed at those who will be there, not simply imagining, but feet on the ground.  Following their usual format the pieces are conceived and presented as belonging to, and reflecting a place — the city, the canals, Jordaan, the Red Light district.  Each section typically has two or three offerings, though there are a couple with only one.  Added to that, in the Amsterdam volume, are two sections on minority groups — Gay Amsterdam and Jewish Amsterdam.  Writers poke around the city, and we go with them, not as travel writing, but as reports from heart and home.

Cees Noteboom, a novelist (of Rituals, among others, 1980, translated by Adrienne Dixon) and travel writer, begins with an evocative walk-around appreciation, beginning in earliest times:

A region of sparse farmers and fishermen, a population of water people between the streams, the mire, and the flows of water … always threatened by the rising sea, by the settling of the peat, by storms and floods.

to the Golden Age, when

…the walker can hear all of those ships, caravels, frigates, galleons, brigantines, brigs; he can smell the spice, hear the foreign tongues of the many who have taken refuge in his city: Portuguese and Spanish Jews, Huguenots, Flemish Calvinists, but also loners like Descartes…

and now

Open city, closed city.  A city on the water, a city of people, devised and written by man and water.  A city of all times and a city in time.

The section titled “Canals” has two marvelous stories about artists.   “The Three Galleries” by J. Bernlef tells of a hopeful, small-town, painter, duped and scammed –Sensational!  Extraordinary!– by gallery owners and art dealers in the big city, who eventually returns home, perhaps to work in his father’s furniture shop, perhaps to find in his model the wife she would like to be.

“Soft Landings,” by Remco Campert, [translated very nicely by Paul Vincent] is my favorite. Onno Mulder is an erstwhile poet, trying with might and main to stay out of the bars which, on the one hand launch his poetic flights, on the other bring them crashing down in an alcoholic haze. On his mind is his late, best, friend, whose memory demands a fine poem — which is eluding Onno’s every effort.  It is one of the most beguiling, sweet/sad, stories I’ve read in a long while.  On a walk around his home town, seeking inspiration, he is recognized and asked to do an interview — over beer.

“But you people better watch things around here,” he said to Van Rekum and the others who had moved their chairs closer as the afternoon progressed and who, so he thought, were listening in fascination to him, the poetic oracle from the big city.  And he criticized in passionate terms the shameful way in which the woods of his childhood (his woods!) had been treated

“Torenburg, the real estate agent” they all knew.  Van Rekum implied he had information that showed this gentleman, who had a finger in every pie in town, in a very unfavorable light. But his editor in chief was as thick as thieves with Torenburg, so I don’t have to tell you anything more about that, Onno.

Haarten ‘t Hart’s “Living in the Red Light District” seemed more mini-memoir than a fiction but who knows. The matter-of-fact telling of events is a nice counter to any racy expectation one might begin with.  Geert Mak, whose slender history, Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City, is highly regarded, contributes another reportage, about life at night around the great Centraal Station.  Like many big city public areas, it didn’t make me want to hang around more than to find a bus towards the canals.

I have to say I was not taken by the two selections in Gay Amsterdam, though “Flesh and Blood” by Bas Heijne was more compelling than “The Light at the End of the Tunnel” by Garret Komrij.  I couldn’t find much to like about his characters.  “Jewish Amsterdam” was more interesting  with two stories from the war years. “The Decline and Fall of the Boskowitz Family,” by the well known novelist Gerard Reve, takes us into the inexorable tide of Nazi terror in the city, creeping up slowly at first, the family and their friends seeing but not understanding quite what was happening.

 

The young narrator, as boys will be, is sometimes thrilled at the sounds and sights of military might.

As Maak tells us in his book,  for all the pride the Dutch and Amsterdamers in particular, have for their aid and assistance to Dutch Jews during WW II (i.e. Anne Frank) lifting a few rocks reveal unsettling facts.

In reality, proportionally more Jews were deported from the Netherlands than from any other Western European country.  As Adolf Eichman was to explain later, the persecution ran “like clockwork.” After the war an official investigation found that almost half a million Dutch men and women had collaborated with the occupying forces in one way or another.”

There was a population of about 80,000 Dutch Jews in 1941, of which about 80% perished. It is now about 15,000 after some return to the city in recent years.

As Mak also tells us,  “The war years were hard, the dilemmas almost irresolvable, and it befits generations that had no part in this period to be cautious in their judgement.”

Unfortunately, the story fails a bit to my ear in what I take to be a faux-naif telling.  The young boy, who begins as a seven year old, jumps years and facts and straight-line logic in a way which,  when done properly, [the Catalan writer Merce Rodoreda does it marvelously in her Quanta, quanta guerra.. (So much of such a war] serves up difficult matters through the eyes of a child.  I don’t know whether the problem is Reve’s or in the translation, but in the middle of a passage in a child’s voice, a word or a constuction pops out a child would be unlikely to use, spoiling the effect.

And sometimes a sentence that, to me at least, is not easily understood:

“They’re getting something to put up with again over in England,” said a milkman who had concluded they were German airplanes on their way to England…

Following the war, some who had left the big cities and stayed alive, came back.  Marga Minco’s “The Return” gives us a short, aching account of one man and his wife who find their house occupied, and no work to be had.

“…he walked along the embankment and looked at the house where he had lived for more than twenty years .. he scanned it again, from porch to gable and felt he was somebody else, not the man who used to live there, who had witnessed the birth of his children behind those white curtains.

And worst of all, though told in a subdued — and therefore more telling– manner, the two children are not with the parents.  Gone. Unknown where or, known, but not admitted to, as if absence of acknowledgement keeps them alive somehow.

After “Soft Landings,” I was most impressed with “Apolline,” written by a Moroccan immigrant, Hafid Bouazza, I presume in Dutch. In impressive imagery and wonderfully erotic memory he brings us the tall, blond Apolline, who seduces and abandons the immigrant boy, and with her Amsterdam itself, impressing itself on us as none of the other writers have done.

“I  can no longer recall my first impression of Amsterdam, grafted as I am on the vertebrae of her cobbles, the wooden wombs of her bars and weathered loins of her seedy neighborhoods.”  [Nice — but ‘bars’ has the double sense in English of window bars and drinking bars… I wonder if “coffee bars” would have worked?]

“I moved into a small flat in Eglantine Street: a cavity in a row of decaying teeth. It was a room with all the poetry of a solitary life: dented saucepan, unmade bed, dusty windowpanes .  Single-handed solace in the tedious gloom, love at a price on Fridays.”

It’s a good volume though perhaps not as strong as other Wereabouts Press volumes  I’ve read say, from Costa Rica, or Spain.  Several are very short pieces from well thought of columnists.  They are nice but are sketches, quick observations, not stories taking us somewhere into a person or event.  I kept wondering, as I was there and reading these, where is the rain, and wind?  Where are the bicycles, racked in their thousands, rolling through the streets, silent, fast, startling pedestrians?  Where is the Dutch character — “open the windows, keep the doors closed”– which they, themselves, are proud of repeating.  Where are the water worriers, dam builders, the presence of the sea?  The food, the surprise of blue skies and sunshine after days of rain?

Nevertheless, for a beginning foray into the city and the minds of well known writers it’s a good place to start. From the California coast it’s a long trip to Amsterdam. The book is a good way to begin.