Because I can only read short stretches of text, I’m re-reading Andreas Burnier’s collection of essays: Poetry, Boys and the Company of Learned Women. I admired Burnier (C.I. Dessaur) when I first starting to read her work; her novels are/were standard fare in secondary schools, and her early novels are both poignant and very humorous. Of course, they are also a pretty good depiction of being jewish in The Netherlands in the first couple of decades after world war two. And Burnier’s theories and explorations of the androgynous spoke to my heart. Then, when we moved to Amsterdam and became involved in the LJG, we met, as she had at last summoned up the courage to declare herself Jewish by religion and became involved in the LJG. Ironically, she became my student when I taught a talmud class, and a series of her shiurim that I attended were so intellectually stimulating that I wrote my own book about “how to do” judaism, with Burnier as my intended, imaginary Reader. I wanted the book to be consoling, to be fear reducing. She and I were also involved in the translations for the new Sidur. And once, seeing how depressed I was, she decided to act and took me out to lunch and talked about the workings of the universe and death and literature. Very restorative. Only four years ago, I walked into the Beit Ha Chidush synagogue on Yom Kipur to find D., her life partner there. That was about 2 years after Burnier died, so D.’s wounds were still fresh. We were very surprised to find each other there, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise, really: the Dutch community is so small, you’re bound to run into people who are involved in it. We hugged and then sat together for a long while.
post scriptum: Burnier also opened up the relative silence surrounding patrilinear jews, for whom she coined the term “fatherjews” at a widely publicized conference about jews in hiding during the holocaust.