Writing and addressing social injustice were one thing for Yvonne Keuls

‘Be amiable’, Yvonne Keuls learned as a child. It became the guiding principle of her life. The amiable but also combative writer Yvonne Keuls, who translated drug problems, youth care, the judiciary and the Dutch East Indies into broadly appealing stories, novels and plays, died on Sunday evening in The Hague after a short illness, her family announced.

The life of Yvonne Keuls, born in 1931 in what was then Batavia as Yvonne Bamberg, was shaped when she was eight years old. At that age, the family of which she was the youngest daughter left for the Netherlands, because her father had tuberculosis and could no longer stay in Indonesia. Her mother would never manage to put down roots in The Hague, but she did bring stories with her. “Our mother talked us through the war,” Keuls said in interviews.

This was especially necessary when her father committed suicide in 1944, during the Hunger Winter. In an interview in 2006 in Fidelity Keuls said: “My father decided that he would not make it through the winter anyway and that there was no point in living any longer. The others could use that one sandwich much better. Moreover, I, the youngest of the bunch, also already had TB and he was afraid that he would also infect the rest of the family.” It was one of the important reasons why Keuls described himself as a war child.

Her father appears less in her literary work than her mother, but a nice exception is the novella The child’s journey (1990), in which a seven-year-old girl returns to the Netherlands with her Dutch father and Indian mother. Her mother is sick during that trip because of the uprooting she faces now that she has left her family behind. On the boat she discovers that her father can also tell the story and how she becomes closer to him: “He suddenly turned out to be a friendlier and talkative person.”

Once back in the Netherlands, Keuls was given her own role as narrator. Her mother refused to wear shoes and therefore did not go outside. In The child’s journey she writes: “In Holland they are all different from us, they have different clothes and different shoes. Not those soft slippers, but hard shoes, like a prison, with thick soles and laces that constrict your feet, just like the Chinese women. You can’t even walk because of the pain.” It led to Yvonne having to go out on the street as a child to be able to tell what was happening in the outside world, she writes in Madam my mother (1999).

Indian books

So the lesson was there from an early age: the story is important, and this is especially evident from the Indian novels and stories about the family, with a leading role for her mother. They work – including the stories that accompany the recipes At the table with Yvonne Keuls (2000) – are somewhat more intimate than her early novels and give plenty of space to the background of her mother’s side, as if the uprooting could be somewhat undone.

In Lowietjes compensation (2003), in which Keuls talks about the mistreatment of an aunt by the Japanese during the Second World War, the social enthusiasm that also characterizes her early work can be seen. She describes in the autobiographical why they only came with those Indies books later Madame K.which tells the story of a talented and imaginative child who goes to the Netherlands, develops into someone with a family, has many social contacts and builds a career as a writer.

It was not initially written in the stars that Keuls would become a writer. In Madam my mother she says that a teacher at school wanted to convince her mother that theater was a good idea. Her mother would have none of it: “I have long since decided what my children should become. I assume this: there have always been wars and so have children, so my sons will join the army and my daughters will become a teacher, then they will always have their sandwich.” And so it happened: Keuls started teaching, until she married Rob Keuls at the age of 22.

The scene, which was initially out of the question, reappeared. Her What a shame, Frances! Comedy in three actswhich was published in 1960 under her maiden name Yvonne Bamberg, led to the request for Louis Couperus’ The Books of Little Souls to edit for an NCRV television series, which was broadcast in 1969. Later, several assignments followed to develop novels into TV scripts.

Jan Rap

She was already successful as a writer who had adapted novels by Couperus and Vestdijk for television when, in 1973, she co-founded JOS, a shelter for young people struggling with psychological and addiction problems. The house closed after a year due to lack of money, but that experience planted the seeds for Keuls as a committed novelist.

Her novel debut, Jan Rap and his buddy (1977), she based it partly on what she had seen at JOS, and was adapted for theatre. That was a success, Cologne received prizes, the play was translated into ten languages ​​and played in 25 European theaters. Wrote about the stage version de Volkskrant “

The committed writer who presented topics such as drug use, the lack of shelters and child abuse in appealing stories for a wide audience was born. Keuls’ stories, which had once started to present her mother with a different world, became books that exposed power relations.

That was true The mother of David S. (1980), about the mother of a drug addict, which was made into a film in 1982 and was followed by The rotten life of Floortje Bloem (1982). She based that novel on her encounters with prostitutes who were addicted to heroin. After a TV interview with Sonja Barend, viewers sent money to set up an aid bus for heroin prostitutes.

After that performance, she also received a letter from a boy who wondered why she had only written about girls. She took up that question, after which she came up with Annie Berber and the sorrow of a tender intellectual (1985), about addicted prostitutes and the sexual abuse of a juvenile judge who had the task of protecting those children. In NRC the then Attorney General of the Supreme Court stated that she had written the book for her “own gain”, some readers abandoned her and fellow authors also did not respond when she asked for open support. The case was dismissed and the juvenile court judge in question was given an honorable discharge.

Her latest novel, Gem Victoria (2021), is yet another indictment of youth care, this time in the form of the seventeen-year-old mother who gives birth to the child Gemmetje and from whom the child, despite protests from the mother, is immediately taken away by youth care after the birth.

In this book, Keuls also combined fact and fiction, as she did early in her work when this was less common. It has now become an indispensable literary process, and perhaps we partly owe this to Keuls’ mother: “Of course it is really true,” her mother said when she told a family story. “But maybe not everything is really true. And you should never ask whether it is really true, that is insulting. And insulting is always worse than not telling the truth.”

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