Like Marga Minco’s other novels, The Glass Bridge is a short, lucid and beautifully crafted piece of work that always says rather more than the words on the page reveal. Every sentence, each scene, is exactly and clearly drawn, but the recurring echoes, parallels and leitmotifs running through the story gradually build up into an overall picture that is more than the sum of its parts. Not that Minco plays a cheap game of hide and seek with the reader. Her theme, the Nazi persecution of Dutch Jews during the Second World War, is too serious for that. But she manages to tell a deliberately understated story that nevertheless contains enough additional indications and signposts to actively involve the reader and have him or her filling in the rest of the picture. It’s a technique Minco has honed to perfection.


The book falls into two parts. In the first, which is set during the War, Stella is a young Jewish woman in her early twenties, living with her family. One day in 1943 their house is raided by German police and everyone taken away, but Stella escapes by climbing onto the roof. Using contacts and false papers she goes into hiding, first on a farm, then in a house in Haarlem where she meets the underground activist Carlo and is given the identity of one Maria Roselier. It is not a fictitious identity: the real Maria Roselier had died on the second day of the war and Carlo’s resistance cell stole her identity card and papers from the local Registry Office. Stella sits out the war as Maria Roselier. She has a brief passionate relationship with Carlo before he is arrested by the Germans, never to return.


All of this is told in the first person, through Stella. The second and much shorter part of the book takes place towards the end of the 1950s or so and the narrative abruptly changes from first into third person. Stella’s entire family has perished in the concentration camps, she herself has been married and divorced. We see her travelling to the village in the southern Netherlands where Maria Roselier used to live in order to find out what she can about the person whose identity she took during the war. It’s not very much, and Stella soon returns home.


The question of identity is at the heart of the book, as indeed the sudden change from first to third-person story-telling suggests. Maria Roselier is not any false name — for a time Stella is Maria Roselier. Her identity card is fake but also genuine, in contrast to the exorbitantly expensive and poor-quality documents procured by the family for Stella’s brother, which were of no help to him when he was stopped by a German patrol. When, long after the war, Stella finally summons up the courage to visit Maria’s village and enquire about her, most of what she hears is quite different from what she had imagined, yet there are also some intriguing similarities between her and Maria. Moreover, the local doctor who provides Stella with details about Maria turns out to have had a son who worked with Carlo in the underground during the war. Both young men paid with their lives for their heroism. For Stella, the mention of Carlo after all these years still hurts: it turns out that her life since the war has been one long search for someone who, like Carlo, and like her father before that, could give her a sense of security and protection.


But we can’t turn the clock back. Stella could assume Maria Roselier’s identity but the real Maria Roselier was different after all. The father, and then Carlo, cannot be replaced. We cannot cross the bridge back to the past, we are always travelling on. The ‘glass bridge’ of the title is the hump-backed, ice-covered bridge which Stella quickly crossed, and on which her father lingered for a while, after they had gone to pay for false identity papers for Stella’s brother and his wife. The image returns on several occasions, as does that of Stella’s travelling-bag, a symbol of her moving from one place to another; she still has such a bag with her when she finally makes her futile journey in search of Maria Roselier at the end of the book.

She brushed out her shoulder-length hair, trying to hide the grey streaks, but to no avail. She looked at the steadily deepening lines in her face, the heavy eyelids, the skin darkening under the sockets; and the images rose, the faces appeared. They had kept coming back to her, often at moments when she was least prepared: riding in her car though a deserted landscape or the crush of the city, in the middle of a conversation on a winter afternoon when the street-lamps were not yet lit and the light outside waned mercilessly; she saw them, now tangibly close, now totally unreachable. In her recurring dream, Carlo sometimes took the place of her father. Carlo, too, would be standing on the opposite side and moving towards the bridge — now delicate as a pencil drawing — while the distance between them remained unchanged.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she drained her glass. The cotton curtain rippled, letting in the faint glow from a street-lamp. The room filled with the mingled odours of manure and humus, the same as she had smelled on the country road. (p. 90-1, tr. Stacey Knecht)