A HIDDEN LIFE

The Dutch American author of the young-adult Holocaust novel The Upstairs Room (1972) recounts the unexpected, devastating suicide of her husband.

Before she wrote her Newbery Honor–winning book based on her real-life story, Reiss resolved, at the urging of her American husband, to return to Holland and face her memories of that painful time. In the summer of 1969, she traveled to Holland, accompanied by her two school-age daughters. Intending to stay seven weeks, she alternately visited her sisters, Sini and Rachel, and the Oostervelds, who sheltered Sini and the author for two-and-a-half years in their house in Usselo. Jim, Reiss’s American husband of nearly 11 years, joined the family as planned after two weeks, and together they criss-crossed Holland. But Jim—a well-educated, non-practicing Jew from Philadelphia who worked at a retail firm in New York City, where the Reisses lived—seemed distracted and distressed, and his wife sensed “something was off.” After returning home alone, he killed himself in their apartment off Second Avenue. The author, shocked and angry at what seemed to her a betrayal, rushed back to arrange a funeral. Reiss’s re-creation of this wrenching period is somewhat scattershot, no doubt reflecting her emotional turmoil. There are moments of strenuous clarity, such as when she and Jim returned together to the hiding room upstairs in the Oostervelds’ home, and each sank into a personal grief. Reiss longed for him to hold her, “to extinguish other people’s heat that I’d been carrying around ever since the war,” though he stood oblivious, “appearing undone.” The author attempts to make sense of his seemingly senseless death, yet the focus is narrow, the ending abrupt and the emotion still raw.

Readers of this troubling account will be eager to rediscover The Upstairs Room.