Sometimes the emotion lies in a single sentence. I noticed that when I… Jo by Judith Herzberg read. That sentence, the first from that beautifully designed book, reads: ‘The greatest love of my entire life, I now know for sure, was the love for Jo.’ You immediately realize that those words could only now be written and that Jo is no longer there. Therein lies their subtle meaning, which makes this book a literary jewel.
In 1934, Jo came to work as a maid for the parents of Judith Herzberg, who was born that same year. And since her mother wanted to have a career and was not at home much, Jo became Judith’s ‘actual mother’, as she would write years later in the poem ‘Tuesday’.
Actually it is Jo a 100-page explanation of that poem from 1960. As if Herzberg wants to refresh her memory. She even admits certain memories for the first time. As a result, it only now seems to dawn on her that she owes her life to Jo, because he took her from one hiding place to another during the German occupation. The ordinary ‘doing it every day, not leaving it at that’ was Jo’s only motivation. Suddenly aware of this, Herzberg is reluctant to write down what would have happened otherwise: ‘being betrayed and then after all kinds of things – being gassed.’
Digging into her subconscious with the pen, Herzberg recalls memories of the war years through Jo. It leads to compelling associative prose of an almost naive kind, which says more about the apparently mundane nature of the persecution of the Jews than many historical studies.
Herzberg’s thoughts run wild. Just like in the poems in Jo are recorded, she thereby reaches a deeper truth than if she had written everything down chronologically.
She also talks about the scarcity of words for remembering. There are remembered memories, told memories, faded memories and worn-out memories, or memories of which you no longer know whether they are real because you have served them up yourself. In this way she gives memory free rein, without underestimating the role of the ‘forgetter’.
She worries, among other things, about the title of ‘Tuesday’. Does it refer to the day on which the deportation trains left Westerbork for Auschwitz in 1943 or to the day on which Jo visited her in Barneveld when she and her parents were locked up on an estate there by the Germans? And what about that posh Mrs. Wiardi Beckman on the Apollolaan, for whom Jo became a servant after she was no longer allowed to work for Jews? After her flight from Barneveld in 1943, again thanks to Jo, she went into hiding there. But one day there was a note in the mail saying ‘Get rid of that child, it’s dangerous’. Fortunately, Jo immediately took her to another address, this time with the help of ‘Mr. Pastoor’. Jo apparently “did the obvious thing,” she concludes at one point.
When Herzberg remembers an indefinable sadness from that time, ‘a crying sadness about being abandoned, which I expressed as concern for my parents’, she also realizes that she actually only longed for Jo. Hence the belated declaration of love.
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