Hidden Tapestry: Jan Yoors, His Two Wives, and the War That Made Them One
312
Hidden Tapestry: Jan Yoors, His Two Wives, and the War That Made Them One
312Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
At twelve, Jan’s life took an extraordinary and unexpected turn when, lured by stories of Gypsies, he wandered off with a group of Roma and continued to live on-and-off with them and with his own family for several years. As an adult in German-occupied France, Yoors joined the Resistance and persuaded his adoptive Roma family to fight alongside him. Defying repeated arrests and torture by the Gestapo, he worked first as a saboteur and later escorted Allied soldiers trapped behind German lines across the Pyrenees to freedom.
After the war, he married childhood friend Annabert van Wettum and embarked on his career as an artist. When a friend of Annabert’s, Marianne Citroen, modeled for Yoors, the two began an affair, which led the three to form a polyamorous family that would last for the rest of their lives. Moving to New York, the trio became part of the bohemian life of Greenwich Village in the 1950s.
Told in arresting detail by Debra Dean, best-selling author of The Madonnas of Leningrad, Yoors’s story is a luminous and inspiring account of resilience, resourcefulness, and love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810136830 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2018 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Pingola
A child will forever remember a certain happening in his or her life and one cannot explain why — yet those memories are always with them. And so it was that summer, when I was seven years old, away from home, staying with my father's friends and meeting Jan Yoors.
— from annabert's diaries
It was the summer of 1935, and Annabert van Wettum had been sent to the resort town of Zeist in the Netherlands to spend a few weeks at a vacation camp for children. All the way from The Hague, three hours by car, she had been brave, but that night, alone in a strange bed, she was overwhelmed with loneliness. She wrapped the hem of her flannel nightgown around her feet to protect them and tried to picture her guardian angel, but it was no good. She wept, heartbroken.
She had not been apart from her father since her mother ran off with the architect three years earlier. At a loss, her father had placed his two children with neighbors. Annabert's earliest memories were of waking up at night, the other children in the house pinching her toes. She curled into herself, both figuratively and literally, and stopped eating. Twice a day for nearly a year, her father came to the house and spoon-fed her lunch and dinner, until at last they were reunited in a house by the sea that her regal, white-haired grandmother, Omie, had built for this purpose. Now, her father had sent her away again.
Daughters adore fathers, but Annabert's propensity to worship was unusual, and to understand the rest of the story one must first know a little something about Anthroposophy. Annabert's father, Jan van Wettum, was an ardent disciple of a movement that emerged in the spiritualist craze of the late nineteenth century, a religion blending teachings of Christianity, Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, and Goethe 's mystical writings, along with original occult doctrine. The movement's followers believed that over time human beings had become too attached to the material world and thus blinded to reality which was, they said, largely spiritual. Anthroposophy promised to redevelop their innate spiritual perception.
Anthroposophy's founder, Rudolf Steiner, had a particular interest in childhood education, and it's here that his reach is felt even today: the thousands of schools and kindergartens worldwide known as Waldorf schools are grounded in the principles of Anthroposophy. Annabert's father taught at one of the first of these, the Vrije School den Haag (Free School of The Hague), which Annabert attended alongside her best friend, Marianne. Here the children listened to their teachers recite Germanic fairy tales and myths and were encouraged to understand their own lives in these same romantic terms.
Steiner's followers had also founded a school, called Zonnehuis, House of the Sun, to serve the needs of developmentally disabled children. In the summers, they added a camp for the children of Anthroposophists.
Her first morning at Zonnehuis, Annabert peered out the window of her room and saw a blond boy waving at her from an upper window of an ivy-covered stone house across the way. She waved back. For timid Annabert, it was a hugely significant moment, and she began to recast the narrative in her head. He was a fairy-tale prince, and the stone mansion was a dark and somber castle where lived strange people from the underworld.
The next day, she and the other campers were exploring a nearby wooded park and discovered a clearing with a large oak tree at its center and a little makeshift dugout. All at once, they were startled by whooping cries, and the boy — her prince — sprang out from behind the oak tree. The boy was costumed in a makeshift American Indian costume — his wide-collared white shirt opened to the waist and a blanket thrown over one shoulder — and he was armed with a real bow. He shook a lock of hair out of his eyes, a carefree gesture that devastated the young Annabert. Then he dove into the dugout and reemerged with a bar of chocolate to share.
Tall, slender, and flaxen-haired, twelve-year-old Jan Yoors possessed a confidence that mesmerized not only Annabert but the other campers as well, more of whom gathered around him each day. Like a Pied Piper, he enlisted their help to build a village of huts, which he decided to call Pingola. They would all be Indians, he proposed, peaceful and brave, and he would be their chief, Woega. Another girl, Esther, quickly volunteered to be the chief 's wife, and he named her Woeganda. He designated Annabert their daughter and christened her Chikita.
She followed Jan about, shy to the point of wordlessness but continually at his elbow. Unlike the other boys, who were coarse and rambunctious, Jan always spoke to her gently. One day, they fashioned a rope swing for the big oak tree and were taking turns swinging in it. It was wonderful, she wrote later, swinging higher and higher, her head in the leaves, then past the ground and up again, into the heavens. Suddenly, the rope broke. She fell and blacked out. When she came to, Jan was bent over her.
Did you hurt yourself? he asked.
She saw the tender concern in his expression and forgot her pain. He lifted her up in his arms and carried her to her house. Trained by Anthroposophy to recognize the hand of destiny, Annabert knew she 'd found her soul's mate. She might only be seven, but it was a conviction she would carry for the rest of her life.
In Pingola, time stopped, but outside it ticked forward. After two weeks had passed, Annabert was scheduled to visit her mother, who had married the Architect. Jan was to return home to Antwerp, Belgium. They pledged to write each other, but Annabert was bereft. Jan gently reassured her: Esther might be his pretend Indian wife, but someday when they were big, he would come back to the Netherlands and take Annabert as his real wife. As she was being driven away in her stepfather's car, he ran alongside, waving. She waved back frantically until he was lost to view.
The Hague 3 October '35
Dear Jan,
How is everything with your wrist? I like it so much that your letter came right on my birthday. I got twelve presents. I got a photo album, and now I can put your photos in it.
18 December 1935
Dear Annabert:
How are you? You have to excuse me that I didn't write to you earlier, but don't think that I have forgotten you. I have been very busy with examinations and I am very well graduated. I was one of the first three of eleven in Latin, Greek, Netherlands, French, German, and the first in Drawing. I wish very much to come to The Hague. My wrist is totally healed and you cannot see anything anymore, and I can use it just as well as the other one. When I can, I will bring you the bracelet that I bought in Malang. During the last vacation I was in Gistroux, Malang. There my father has sugar, corn, banana, and cassava plantations, that I went to visit.
My father has enormous pampas near Tuantepec where hundreds of horses and buffaloes are. I think I told you about that in Zeist. As soon as I see you, I will tell you about my travels and show you beautiful photos from there. Thank you very much for your photos. You are all looking very well.
With many greetings from Jan
In truth, the thirteen-year-old boy boasting about his academic successes had been attending school only sporadically. And though he 'd been traveling continually, he had never stepped foot off the continent, much less to Malang in East Java or Tehuantepec in Mexico. His father had no plantations, no herds of horses and buffalo. In short, there would be no photos forthcoming. In lieu of these, Jan had illustrated his letter with tiny pencil drawings of a bracelet; a temple topped by a half moon; two hunters, one with a ten-gallon hat, the other in native garb; and at the bottom of the page, next to his signature, a little sketch of two Indians in feather headdresses sharing a pipe at a campfire. Nearby was a group of teepees shaded by, of all things, a palm tree.
Most likely the wrist injury was a guise to explain the lapse on his side of their correspondence. Even so, the inventions contained threads of truth. His mother had some American Indian blood and was descended from a prominent shipbuilding family that had come to Antwerp a generation earlier, following a slave revolt on their plantation in Cuba. It's reasonable to think they may have raised sugar, cassava, corn, or bananas, and that this bit of family lore trickled into Jan's fabrications, along with the palm trees. And while he was doing poorly in more subjects than he was excelling, he did possess an unusual gift for languages and had gotten good marks in those classes. At home, he spoke French with his mother, Spanish with his father, and German with the exchange students who helped in the household. When in school, he conversed in Flemish. When not in school, he was gaining fluency in yet another language, Romani.
He had also earned that first in drawing. His father, Eugeen Yoors, was a painter and stained glass artist, and many of Jan's idyllic early memories were set in the skylit studio on the top floor of their house. His mother, a social reformer, traveled frequently, and in her absence his father would sit him down in a sunny corner with paints and charcoal and drawing paper to keep him occupied. As a reward for working quietly, his father told him tales from Greek, Finnish, and Indian mythology as well as reminiscences of the Gitanos, the Spanish Gypsies from Eugeen Yoors' own childhood in Andalusia. He recited the deeds of Old Testament heroes, and the Catholic saints and martyrs who were the subjects of the church windows he was designing. It's no surprise that when Jan first met Annabert, he was playing at being an American Indian or that his subsequent letters to her invoked fantasies of faraway lands and wild peoples. No, the surprise is that his fibs to Annabert were cover for a real-life adventure every bit as improbable as the lies.
CHAPTER 2
The Gypsies
I was probably 6 years old when I first heard about gypsies. I was lying down on my stomach in the middle of the floor of my father's large atelier and I was drawing. ...
My father spoke of a little gypsy girl that he met on the El Rocío pilgrimage. From the portrait that my father told us about the little bohemian, she was extraordinarily pretty, intelligent also, and she was only six years old, the same age as my father at the time. What caught my attention was that she was exactly the same age as I; that, above all, brought me closer to her. And then her foreign name, "Pepita," and also that my father discussed gypsies a lot that night. He told thousands of stories.
That night I dreamed of gypsies. I was ignorant about what they were, but I imagined that they must be extraordinary beings of beauty and intelligence, almost superhuman and close to angels.
— jan yoors
Just as Annabert's life was set on its course by a chance meeting in childhood, so too was Jan's. When he was twelve years old, the spring after he met Annabert and her friends, he happened upon another group of children. An extended family of Gypsies, called a kumpania, had made camp on the outskirts of his hometown of Antwerp, and he was lured there one afternoon by the chance to see real, live incarnations of his father's stories. A caravan of about fifteen covered wagons was drawn into a semicircle, and from inside rose thin plumes of campfire smoke. Several men lounged in the shade of a tree, and the women, dressed in long, flowing skirts and with gold coins for jewelry, tended the fires. Children, naked or in dirty rags, ran about the camp, shrieking and tossing sticks for wildly barking dogs. They were quite different from the Gypsies his father had described, "who were ethereal, mythical, and above all imaginary." These people were earthy and exuberant, laughing and shouting. They had an animal magnetism that pulled Jan closer to the fire. The older Gypsies paid him no mind, but a few of the boys ran to meet him.
Jan addressed them in Spanish, the language of his father's Gypsies. The boys didn't know Spanish and tried answering in broken German. However, their mutual curiosity overcame the challenges of language, and soon the boys were showing Jan the tribe 's horses, tethered at the edge of the camp. Then they showed him a string of small, dead animals hung on a line. One of the boys, Nanosh, explained that they had caught these, that they were hedgehogs and were a great delicacy. He promised to show Jan how to hunt them next time he visited.
Suddenly, an ancient, leather-skinned woman appeared and began hurling abuse at Jan, yelling at him to go home. Jan was unnerved, but behind her back the boys grinned and gestured that he shouldn't pay her any mind. Old Lyuba wouldn't really hurt him. They all disliked strangers, of course, but Lyuba was in the habit of expressing her dislike very loudly.
Rom — Nanosh pointed proudly to his own chest — was the word for themselves. He hesitated and then pointed at Jan: Gaje was the word for everyone else. Jan saw, to his surprise, that the word was not a compliment. Not only did the Rom not feel themselves inferior, they had as many prejudices against the Gaje as the Gaje had against them.
The Gypsy boys were barefoot, and trying to fit in, Jan took off his shoes. First one boy tried on the shoes, then another took a turn. He then passed the shoes to the older boys whose feet were too large, a problem they solved by lopping off the toes of the shoes. Briefly, Jan wondered how he was going to explain this to his parents, but only briefly. He was having too much fun.
The boys invited Jan to stay for dinner. Sitting with Nanosh, he listened to the Gypsies telling stories and singing around the blazing campfire. Though he couldn't understand a word, he was entranced. Before he knew it, the sky had darkened, the Gypsies were spreading eiderdown quilts on the ground, and Nanosh was inviting him to share a makeshift bed with him and his little brothers. It was already so late and Jan was without shoes. Without reasoning any further than this, he spent the night.
He awoke early the next morning to the hysterical barking of the dogs, voices yelling, and a bedlam of frenzied activity. The police were raiding the camp, forcing the Gypsies on their way. Bedding was being pulled up, and pots and pans thrown into the wagons. The men unchained the horses and hitched them to wagons. Putzina hurriedly directed Jan into his family's wagon, and Nanosh helped hide him under a pile of quilts. The wagon began to rock and move. Jan peeked out from under the quilts and saw policemen at a crossroads shouting directions, sending one wagon this way, another that, in order to break up the large group. When Jan finally dared to come out from under the quilts, he was on an unfamiliar road, in a small caravan of wagons.
"I just stayed from one day to the other," he later explained, "and eventually I stayed away for six or seven months. It was not running away in a rebellious sense; it was not a planned thing. It just kind of happened. You see, the longer I stayed with them the more difficult it was to go back home. After one night, I might have, but after the second night, I couldn't have anymore. And with the third night, it was impossible."
Had he been any older, he might never have been able to insinuate himself into the closed Romani culture. But with the facility of a child and his own innate charm, he slipped under the fence. He adapted rapidly, learning the language of his hosts and aping their practices. He ate with his fingers and afterwards wiped the grease on them through his hair for shine. He learned which buckets were for wash water, which were for drinking, and all the observances and civilities that allowed the Gypsies to live in close quarters without privacy. The tribe he had joined, headed by Putzina's father, Pulika, was called the Lowara, and they were horse traders, so he learned how to tend to the animals.
The Rom were always on the move. In a sense, this was enforced — no community tolerated their staying in one place for more than a few days — but even had they been allowed, they were too restless to set- tle anywhere. To be alive and free was to be on a journey. The journey had no timetable and no known destination, but that isn't to say it was without purpose. Jan learned to read the subtle signs called vurma — broken twigs or a bit of colored thread tied to a tree that the Rom left along the sides of the road like maps pointing the way for each other. Gypsies traveled in order to meet up with other Gypsies, and as if by magic, hundreds of wagons might converge in one place over the space of a few days, arriving from every compass point. These meetings were cause for celebration, feasts, and an exchange of stories. And then after an indeterminate period, the groups would break apart again and move on, but never in exactly the same configurations in which they had come together. Jan likened the Rom to quicksilver, "joining and splitting and joining, not with the same group, but joining with other groups and splitting again. It's completely different. Nothing is ever static."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hidden Tapestry"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Debra Dean.
Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Part One: War Pingola The Gypsies The Belgian Bohemians The Best Friend The Occupation The Operative Rom Underground The Prison Window The Sardine Letters Death and the Gardener The Hunger Winter The Wild Goose Annabert’s War The Ghosts Part Two: Utopia Pingola Redux Christ on the Mountainside The Other Girl The Apocalypse Tapestry Betwixt and Between A New Family A Threefold Cord The New World Faux Boho Rubie A Lesson in Weaving The Patrons The Family of Man Only One New York Baby Book Tiger and Chipmunk The Models The Blue Door on Waverly Survival The Gypsy King The Dragon ThanksgivingAfterword: Naples, Florida, 2014Author’s NoteAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyCustomer Reviews
Explore More Items
