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TRANSLATIONS

A bed in heaven
The twins

Een bed in de hemel (2000)

A bed in heaven ( 2002)
London : Arcadia, 2002. ISBN 1-900850-64-8
Translation: Ina Rilke

'Yesterday I buried my father: Now I'm in the Astoria Hotel at Kossuth Lajos utca number 19-21. I am lying in bed with his son.'

How has Kata, a middle-aged married woman from Amsterdam, arrived at this extraordinary situation with Stefan?

Like the layers of an onion skin, secret events of her family's past are revealed, one by one: Kata's student days in Holland and her first lvoe, her father Jeno's career as a cellist, his childhood in Budapest with Uncle Miksa, their peasant mother and prosperous middle-class father, then war, the terrible fate of Hungarian Jews, Jeno's escape to Amsterdam, the Dutch woman - Stefan's mother - who hid him there. And, at the very heart, a shameful, cruel enigma.

Just as war throws the entire lives of a generation into disarry, along with the lives of generations to follow, so do the painfull effects of love reverberate from grandparents to parents to children, shaping and reshaping their lives as they attempt to lay their own interpretations on the past.

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De tweeling (1993)

Reviews on The Twins

       

The twins (2000)
London : Arcadia, 2000. ISBN 1-900850-32-X
Translation: Ruth Levitt

The twins (2000)
New York, Soho, 2000. ISBN 1-56947-200-9
Translation: Ruth Levitt

Two elderly women, one Dutch and one German, meet by chance at the famous heath resort of Spa. The recognize in the other their twin sister they believed to be lost. They begin to tell each other their life stories - the last chance to bridge a gulf of almost seventy years.

Born in Cologne in 1916, the twins are brusquely separated from each other after the death of their parents. Anna grows up with her grandfather, in a primitive farming and Catholic milieu on the edge of the Teutoburgerwald. Lotte ends up in the Netherlands because of her TB, living with an uncle who harbours strong socialist sympathies. Bad relationships between the families and the intervening war cause the contact between the two sisters to be broken. When their paths cross again so late in life, Lott, who sheltered Jews in hiding during the war, is initially extremely suspicious of her newly-found twin sister. But through Anna's painful stories she is confronted with the other side of her own reality: the sufferings of ordinary Germans in wartime.

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