The convert - Stefan Hertmans In Rouen in 1070, Vigdis was born the daughter of a well-to-do Christian family. When she was fifteen, she met the Jew, David, son of a chief rabbi, and she fell madly in love with him. After a short time, she left everything behind and fled with him to Navarre. Her father followed her, so they left for a small place in Provence. In the meantime, she became a Jew and was called Sarah. The wars of religion were raging around them. After a short time of rest, fate struck again. The place was hit by a pogrom with dramatic consequences. Sarah survived with her youngest and she fled again, this time to Cairo
In In ‘The Convert’, the Flemish writer Stefan Hertmans, known for his frequently translated book ‘War and Turpentine’, explores the distant past from his country house in the southern French region of Vaucluse, where he escapes the hectic times of today. There he hears of an event that took place at the end of the eleventh century about a Christian woman from the high Norman nobility of Rouen who fell in love with a Jewish man, fled with him and found a temporary accommodation in the hamlet of Monieux. This is a small village where nothing much happens and where time has come to a standstill. There was once an established Jewish community full of life, and its existence became threatened after centuries of peaceful coexistence. Based upon manuscripts found by the historian Norman Golb in the ‘Genizah of Cairo’1, Hertmans tries to clear a path through the ruins of time, to form a tangible image of her and to follow her track in the midst of a tumultuous time - the time in which the first forms of Catharism emerged in the region, and the fear of heresy was all around. Almost recklessly, Hertmans opens a window to a time that is apparently long past, but which comes awfully close again in our
1. The ‘Genizah of Cairo’ (literally 'hiding place') comprises a collection of more than 200,000 fragments of Jewish manuscripts, of which the oldest dates from around the 9th century after Christ. The Genizah is located beneath the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. The manuscripts were saved because somewhere the name of god is mentioned in them and for that reason they could not be destroyed.
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days, because the fault lines turn out to be the same, even after a thousand years. He refrains from any judgment and only looks how an inevitable fate unfolds in the life of a single individual. In this way he gives a name to the loneliness which everyone experiences, who, just like her, has his world torn apart and leaves everything behind, ‘all certainty, her fortune, her prestige, her future and her good name’ (page 73 2). First, she and her beloved are chased by knights which her father sent out to pursue them; then they must flee the advancing armies that had started their crusades, and which had been raised by the French Pope Urban II. Fired up by the promise of a full indulgence, they left a bloody trail 2. The page numbers mentioned in this text refer to pages in the Dutch-language book
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