Yael van der Wouden: "When I was little, they called me Anne Frank because I was Jewish and looked like one, and I hated it."

BarcelonaA love story between two very different women that erupts in the summer of 1961 in an isolated house in the Netherlands. Isabel is a repressed, Calvinist woman, and Eva is Jewish, extroverted, and dresses flashy. These are enough elements to build an intrigue, but Yael van der Wouden's (Tel-Aviv, 1987) debut fiction novel goes much further: it speaks of desire and sex, but also of the legacy of history and what happens when we are complicit with the perpetrators. Writers such as Maggie O'Farrell and Tracy Chevalier have praised The guardian, which won the Women's Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Van der Wouden, who has lived in the Netherlands since she was ten, is now writing a new novel about a woman seeking a divorce in 1929. The guardian It is published by Amsterdam in Catalan, translated by Anna Carreras, and by Salamadra in Spanish.

How did you decide to tell this story?

— I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the war and the postwar period, from my family but also from friends in the Netherlands. When I was 25 and started researching more, I developed a more critical perspective. And then there are all the Isabeles. I've met many; they're a very common archetype in Dutch society, and they've always fascinated me because I can't fully understand why they act the way they do. They're incredibly honest in the worst way, because they say things that hurt. I liked the idea of entering their minds.

Isabel in the book is very prejudiced and, at first, very cold. When you say you've met many, do you mean that in the Netherlands you've met many prejudiced and repressed girls?

— Isabels are very Calvinist women. I'm talking about the Calvinist rejection of any excess. The idea is that God didn't create you to enjoy yourself but to have as pure a body as possible. I grew up in the east of the country, which is very Calvinist. There, they tell you things very directly and clearly, but they also judge you for existing in a way they perceive as too loud or excessive. If you like dancing, if you like food, if you like theater, if you like anything that revolves around pleasure, especially the pleasure of the body, you are considered sinful. And this is what I mean when I say I grew up with many Isabels., I've grown up with a lot of people who have a very repressive relationship with desire.

Isabel, when she tastes pleasure, turns into fire.

— This Isabel is in my hands.

The book addresses many topics: the legacy of the Holocaust, the dispossession of many Jewish families in the post-war period, a lesbian relationship in the 1960s... There is national and private silence.

— Yes, it's the repression of everything that doesn't fit into the version of yourself you want to project to the world. What happened to the Holocaust survivors? How did they return? Who paid for their journey? Were they given clothes? Did they get their homes back? These are fairly taboo topics. In the Netherlands, it was simply a matter of moving on. They wanted to rebuild the country, and ten years later, a narrative began to form: there were parts that didn't fit and were therefore ignored. The house is an analogy to Isabel's body. As long as the house can be safe and locked, her body will be too.

Choose the perspective of the perpetrators, not the victims. Why?

— Sometimes, we have a very naive view. For a long time, we thought that if we managed to tell the story and the suffering of the victims, it wouldn't happen again. It's naive to think that the perpetrators are evil, and incomprehensibly so. Hitler became a caricature of evil. Collectively, we've grown up with a version of history in which we only see ourselves as victims. The problem is that we haven't considered how easily we can become complicit in terrible things., how we look the other way. I think we need to have more narratives that allow us to understand our own complicity. Israel, for example, has constructed the narrative that the entire nation is a victim when what it's actually doing is perpetrating war crimes and genocide. I'm not saying my book changes anything, but it does reflect on how to understand that complicity and then what to do with it.

You grew up in Tel Aviv and moved to the Netherlands when you were ten. Was it difficult to adapt to such a Calvinist society?

— It was a huge change. In Israel, I went to the Democratic School, which was very hippie, and where most of the parents, including mine, were artists. In Zwolle, in the Netherlands, everything was very different. I didn't understand how they played, the parties... I was one of the few immigrants in my school neighborhood and wasn't accepted. The children at my school only knew about Jewishness through the story of Anne Frank and... South ParkThey called me Anne Frank, because I was Jewish and I looked like her. I hated it, because she dies in the end. And they repeated Cartman's phrase from South Park: Fuck you, jews, I'm going home. I tried to fit in, but I couldn't get ahead. I remember every day before school, I'd have that moment with myself in front of the mirror: I'd tell myself that I wouldn't speak that day, that I'd stay quiet so no one would notice. The problem was that I had a bad temper and couldn't keep quiet. I got into a lot of fights. Writing about Isabel was also a way of understanding this culture I was thrust into when I was 10. Now I'm 37, and I have to say I'm more Dutch than anything else.

When you collected the Women's Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious in the United Kingdom, you came out as intersex. Why did you choose that moment to do so?

— It was the Women's Prize for Fiction, and there's so much talk about what femininity is and who is allowed to be a woman... I've spent a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of pain adapting to a notion of femininity. There are many ways to be intersex. In my case, I underwent a lot of surgeries and received a lot of medication, and I had to keep all of this quiet because I simply didn't know how to talk about it. It was easy to keep secret because every morning I tried hard to look like a woman. I think there are more bodies like mine. It was just that hormonal changes pushed me in a different direction. I don't think there is such a thing as a normal female body. No two pairs of breasts are the same. Nor do I think you can say what is a woman and what isn't, because we can all fall outside of this definition. When I gave the speech, I thought, "Hey, here's another version of femininity that might not be acceptable to some." I spent my adolescence hiding. And this influences the creation of characters.