Lieke Noorman writes in a laconic tone about the money worries of herself and her family

The title is misleading, and not necessarily appealing. Bee Gehannes – Scammers, Ostriches and Optimistic Suckers: About Money and Family Think of practical tips on how to manage money in the family. With inheritances, houses, investments, loans. How do you avoid cheating and arguing about it? That is interesting to some. But this book by Lieke Noorman is first and foremost a story about one family, hers, in which ‘fiddling’ with money has brought a lot of misery, trouble and sadness, but also fascinating and exciting stories.

Perhaps Noorman has chosen such a general title in order to set her family story at a distance and to give herself complete freedom as the narrator. In this way she could prevent it from becoming too much her personal history. That worked out well. The book is never boring. Noorman, a journalist, talks about her childhood memories and about her life as a daughter and sister, but at the same time has the role of interviewer, observer and researcher who dives into the archives. She writes the story with ironic detachment, entertaining and laconic – look, what a wonderful family I have – but in the meantime the wounds left on the relatives are palpable.

The story revolves primarily around grandpa Foppe, the father of Noorman’s mother Wil. Lieke rarely saw him as a child: grandpa and grandma had long been divorced. She and her sister Margot knew that their mother and grandmother did not like to talk about him. But the few encounters with him stuck with the girls. Their grandfather was a charming, handsome man, a prankster who wound everyone around his finger. He gave them not one but two ice creams.

Grandpa was a ‘scabby’ and that had to do with money. He had embezzled money in the 1930s, as administrator of the Savings Bank, and wrested loans from people that he had not repaid. In their own words, to invest the money and to return it later, plus it. But the judge did not agree: Foppe had to go to prison. When he was released, his wife took him back in grace, but soon he went wrong again and cheated on her with all kinds of “sweethearts”. After the divorce, he married a woman whose property he ransacked until she firmly decided to manage his finances.

Romantic penchant for poverty

Worse than all the ‘fiddling’ with money is Grandpa Foppe’s biggest secret: he was wrong during World War II. He was a member of the NSB for many years and worked for the Nazis in Eastern Europe. That discovery hits the granddaughter. The image of the charming villain is shattered: ‘Foppe was not a fanatical Nazi, rather an opportunistic job hunter, but I don’t know if I wouldn’t have preferred it the other way around.’

Noorman shows how certain behavior inadvertently creeps into family history time and again. Her mother Wil fell in love with a married man she met in secret, but who chose for his family. She married her second choice, a righteous accountant, and developed an aversion to money. In her eyes, possession was ‘theft’. Their daughters, raised without money worries, develop a romantic penchant for poverty: they would rather write in an attic room or, in Margot’s case, play unpaid acting than a job with security and a pension. Margot, when she finds herself a complete failure, ends her life. Her sister Lieke stops writing, shifts from one poorly paid job to another and has to borrow money from her mother.

Noorman writes with self-mockery about her own strange way of dealing with money. She decides to invest in Brazilian teak trees, an adventure that turns out badly. She tells with mischievous pleasure how the angry investors – good world-improving baby boomers in walking shoes, who want to help poor farmers and make their money work – vent their anger on the guilty. They are funny descriptions, skilfully intertwined with the story of Peeves. But Norman is also one of them. And when she inherits a lot of money after the death of her mother, she sees herself, to her own surprise, walking around in the world of the wealth managers and investor fairs. The blood creeps where it can’t go.