The countryside is in crisis. The shops are closing
down in the villages, there is no school for miles
around and, when they grow up, the few remaining
children will escape to a less arduous life in the city.
The village as we have known it for centuries must adapt
to survive, but what will be lost in the process? In
this book Geert Mak returns to the small Frisian village
of his childhood, Jorwerd (pop. 330 and falling), and
meets the present-day Jorwerders: a stubborn, stoic
people for whom the flat, windswept landscape has been a
source of livelihood for generations, but is now rarely
more than a tourist attraction. He has tea with the
butcher's wife, drops in on the pub for a beer, and
recounts the stirring story of Old Peet, a farmhand who
was born, lived and died in Jorwerd. Such men are an
extinct species in the new free-market Europe and, with
his passing, the village he lived in moved a step along
the road of terminal decline. Jorwerd is not an isolated
case. It is a paradigm for the changing face of the
countryside everywhere in Europe. It has more in common
with an English village than it has with the Dutch city
of Amsterdam.Is progress always a good thing, or is
modernity destroying those social values that once
underpinned all our lives? Despite its travails, in
Jorwerd Mak discovers a neighbourliness and sense of
community that no longer exist in urban life, while
ancient families struggle to preserve their
long-established modus vivendi in a world obsessed with
money and profit. |
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