Mr. Lourie is a gifted writer, and his first-person prose is beautifully crafted to reveal the very soul of the main character, "Joop", from childhood to old age. The story takes place in Amsterdam and begins in the period shortly before the Nazi takeover of Holland in World War II. While Joop and his family suffered from hunger and the fear of the Nazis, they also had to witness the sorrow of the Jewish families whose men were sent into forced labor in Germany, later to know the horror of the concentration camps. The Dutch, who got along well with the Jews of their city, soon realized that their ties with them had to be broken so that the German soldiers would not accuse them of hiding or helping the Jews to escape to other countries.

Reading this narrative, one might begin to believe that the author is describing his own childhood and experiences, and perhaps he is. The basis of the plot is that Joop had a dark secret that he kept for sixty years, until he was forced to reveal it to his younger brother from whom he had been separated since the war. He tells his brother, who was too young at the time to fully understand the effects of the war, about how the family tried to function without adequate food or heat, and how that they learned to live through the Nazi occupation. In the end, the secret is revealed, of course.

This is a thoughtfully written book, seemingly without an agenda other than the revelation of the sixty-year old secret, and it is one that is not son forgotten. I recommend it to anyone who can bear to read about that particularly difficult era. The title, by the way, is derived from the fact that the Dutch resorted to boiling tulip bulbs to make a kind of soup when they ran out of food.
Review by Litera Scripta