Sherbert Illuminated

“Couldn’t they have found a safe house for him that was a bit more…safe?” (94) The UW-Madison press tends to focus on hidden gems and scholarly texts, so I was particularly excited to receive their English translation of Secretly Inside , a novella by Dutch author Hans Warren. It belongs to the subgenre of Dutch hiding narratives, which follow Jewish protagonists as they try to remain undetected in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The most famous example of the genre, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl , is a nonfiction primary source, but other accounts are fictionalized and written after-the-fact. There are several reasons why such a specific premise might be popular in the Netherlands. For one, the tension of hiding and escape keeps readers hooked like a more conventional thriller, founded in real history. Hiding narratives also contribute to Dutch Remberance Culture, promoting tolerance and empathy without depicting the well-known atrocities of the Eastern Front. Furthermore, because

“Perhaps…we will long for the time when we all lay around in the hay and our desires were so fluid and uncertain that they were no longer our own. They became the air we breathed; a thought of Maria’s became mine and mine Infanta’s — a kind of unearthly communion.” (135) From the opposite shore of the last century, Margarita Liberaki’s coming-of-age novel reconjures a lost world. When Three Summers was published in 1946, its idyllic Attic landscape and quiet affairs had been swept away by half a decade of fascist occupation. But Liberaki is not interested in a sweeping commentary or a gripping plot. Instead, she seeks to rescue a handful of moments from the Lethe. Her narrator, Katerina, proves a suitable vessel for memories. Neither as boy-crazy as her eldest sister Maria nor as isolated as the artistic Infanta, she observes the quiet drama of her rural milieu with adolescent curiosity. The novel follows her as she and her family discover love, heartbreak, and their own troubled hist