Novel
De wandelende Jood
Not translated into English
August Vermeylen · 1906
Opening lines
In dien tijd, 't was toen Onze-Lieve-Heer nog onder de mensen preekte, leefde er in een kelderken te Jeruzalem een schoenlapper genaamd Ahasverus.
In those days — it was when Our Lord was still preaching among men — there lived in a little cellar in Jerusalem a cobbler named Ahasuerus.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from dbnl.org
Synopsis
Ahasverus, a cobbler of Jerusalem born in the same year as Jesus, lives in a cellar, resigned to his lot but gnawed by a dull unease. He places his hope in the Nazarene, follows him, neglects his shop and falls into debt; disappointed to see him let himself be condemned without a fight, he does nothing for him. But the Christ's gaze, met on the road to Golgotha, obsesses him and sends him out onto the roads. He then goes through the intoxication of the senses and of visions, then the asceticism beside an old hermit, without finding peace.
Context
The author conceived the plan in 1897, while reading Goethe, and wrote it from October 1904 to October 1905; three of the four chapters first appeared in the review Vlaanderen, and the book came out in 1906 from Van Dishoeck, in Bussum. Hans Vandevoorde reads in it an allegorical autobiography, “the sum of all my youth” according to the author, in which the legend serves as a pretext and the curse laid by Christ disappears. His wife, Gaby, translated it into French with him (La Renaissance du Livre, 1925), and Anton Kippenberg into German in 1917.
Who it is for
A short, allegorical novel in four chapters, in Dutch from the beginning of the century; translated into French in 1925.
Prizes and reception
The book that an essay in the journal Arsenaal called its author's masterpiece in 1945, the year of his death.