The life of historian and writer Hans Goedkoop has long revolved around Renate Rubinstein. The writer, who is best known for her columns in Vrij Nederland under the name Tamar, died in 1991. Since 1996 Goedkoop has been writing her biography.
He only met her once, in the Stadsschouwburg Renate sat in the box with Annie MGSchmidt and held what Goedkoop calls an ‘audience’: “I was looking for a way to give her a hand as a young boy, I was in my early twenties. First Annie MG held out her hand and when I got to Renate she shook my hand looking the other way, making sure you’re nobody.”
Goedkoop therefore only knew the writer from her work: “She was the very first columnist in the Netherlands. Nobody did that yet. She wrote about her own experiences, her own view of things, her own everything. What does the world outside of me have to do with me? to make?”
father’s child
During the 25 years that Hans Goedkoop has now been working on her biography, he gets to know the writer well. Already in her youth he sees the foundations of who she will become later on. “If you look at Renate’s childhood, you see the dangers she always saw.”
When the daughter of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother comes Renate as a little girl in the 1930s with her family in Amsterdam. Her father is arrested very early in the war. Cheap: “She was an absolute father’s child, but he is taken away. One of the men who picks him up reassures her: ‘Der Vati kommt bald wieder’, but he will not come back. If that is possible, then everything is possible. Then you stay the rest see danger of your life.”
There is now a first part of the biography. ‘Father’s Child’ covers the period from a few years before Rubinstein’s birth in Berlin until her father’s death when she was 15. “His death is a defining moment for Renate. Everyone else has cheated her. Who can she trust? Only herself. This is where the questions she will continue to ask for the rest of her life begin.”
terrifyingly topical
Now the book about Renates youth, the story turns out to be frighteningly topical. Hans Goedkoop sees sheltered Ukrainian children walking around in his neighborhood: “These are children who are alone here with their mothers, I think: how many of those children have been told: ‘Der Vati kommt bald wieder?’ There will be children who will never see their father again. History is repeating itself right in front of me.”
The book ‘Father’s Child, Renate Rubinstein’s War’ is now in the shops.