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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Aug 2007, 192 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2008, 192 pages
A gripping fictionalized account of the man who betrayed Anne Frank will not soon be forgotten. Richard Lourie takes us into not only a person’s mind, a time, and a place, but into the treacherous currents of history that sweep lives away.
Published in hardcover in the USA as A Hatred For Tulips, but renamed Joop: A Novel of Anne Frank in paperback.
“People who don’t have secrets imagine them as dark and hidden. It’s just the opposite. Secrets are bright. They light you up. Like the bare lightbulb left on in a cell day and night, they give you no rest.”
So thinks Joop, the narrator of this brief and bitter tale, whose secret is like no other. He has kept that secret for more than sixty years, but now his brother---whom he has not seen since the end of the war---has suddenly shown up at his door.
Having grown up in North America with only the vaguest memories of World War II, Joop’s brother has returned to Amsterdam to find out what his childhood in Holland had been like. But what he discovers is much more than he bargained for---he is startled and dismayed to learn of his own role in the betrayal of Anne Frank.
Transporting readers through the agonizing Nazi takeover of World War II, Joop recounts his role as a boy desiring to feed his starving family. He figures out a way to provide for them, but in doing so, he sets in motion a chain of events that will horrify the entire world.
Just as he did in the internationally acclaimed The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin, here Richard Lourie takes us into not only a person’s mind, a time, and a place, but into the treacherous currents of history that sweep lives away. This gripping fictionalized account of the man who betrayed Anne Frank will not soon be forgotten.
Note: Published in hardcover in the USA as A Hatred For Tulips, but renamed Joop: A Novel of Anne Frank in paperback.
Chapter One
“I am your brother,” said the stranger at the door.
At first I thought he was one of those evangelicals who go from house to house peddling salvation, but then I looked more closely at his face and saw my mother’s eyes looking back at me.
“Come in,” I said.
We didn’t fall into each other’s arms or even shake hands, one too much, the other too little. We hadn’t seen each other for sixty years. What did it mean that we were brothers?
I held the door open for him and as I watched him walk past in profile, I thought: Willem must be sixty-five now.
But he didn’t look it. A face that hadn’t seen much. A gray-haired boy. An American.
“I don’t have much to offer you,” I said. “Beer. Some ham, cheese, bread.”
“Sounds good.”
“I live alone. I don’t keep much in the house.”
“You never married?” he asked, sounding concerned.
“No.”
I didn’t ask him ...
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