20th century Europe’ might lead you to expect, ‘Jorwerd’ is a fascinating
biography of a Frisian village and especially the changes it has gone through
from post-WWII until the mid-1990s that, at times, reads more like a novel than
a work of non-fiction. What happens in this charmingly small community of
farmers might be exemplary of other country villages heavily reliant on the
agrarian sector, but subtitling this work ‘the death...’ does not do the unique
characters that inhabit this particular village justice.
The ‘silent rural revolution’, that is the introduction of machinery and the ‘loss’
of the contact with nature in the agrarian industry, is at centre of ‘Jorwerd’ and
the raison d’être of this work. To argue from there that it caused the ‘death of
the village’ is perhaps a bit much; Mak seems to argue more in the direction of
a many small and big changes that have led the village to be less isolated and
more part of the world, both near and far. This means indeed that certain ways
and customs have been lost. It does not mean, in my opinion, that the ‘village’
does not exist anymore. It exists in a different world, but something of its
essence remains; Mak seems to believe this as well, as is made clear in the
last sentence: And thus the village life continued’.
Dutch newspapers have compared ‘Jorwerd’, a real village in the northern
region of the Netherlands that is Friesland and where another language
(‘Frisian’) is spoken, to the Macondo of García Márquez, the village founded in
the jungle in ‘One hundred years of solitude’. I can only agree with this
comparison, as Mak is also very lyrical writer, who interweaves statistical data
and historical information with small portraits of the people and happenings in
Jorwerd, written in a beautifully composed style that proves that, writing about
village life, fact can sometimes beat fiction.
The ‘silent rural revolution’ has brought about so many changes in a couple of
generations that the Jorwerd of today’s inhabitants (for as much as they are
‘real’ Jorwerd people) would be almost unrecogni-sable for their grandparents,
even though many of the building have remained. This revolution was indeed
‘silent’ in that it took place in the people’s mindset and manners more than in
any physical way. Yes, the introduction of (physical) machinery prompted many
of the changes.
Tractors, milking machines and computer-operated feeding installations have
changed the lives of farmer families forever. Until the Second World War, the
entire family (children included) had to work on the farm, growing crops on a
couple of acres of land or tending to a dozen to twenty cows. Nowadays a
farmer can tend to hundreds of acres or cows by just pushing the right buttons.
This might seem like a big step ahead, but with all work computerised, fewer
farmers could produce more. Mountains of meat and seas of milk flooded a
market that knew an artificially inflated price by EU regulations. The EU,
however, in return asked of the farmers to pay more attention to the
environment and to use special equipment, for example for cooling milk. Huge
investments had to be made whilst the social structures inside the village
started to change too.
The big farming families used to make up the ‘nobility’ of the village, but with
increased prosperity, less people needed to do the same work and easier
mobility brought about by cars and public transport, farmer’s children did not
stay at the farm anymore. They went studying in the big cities, becoming
lawyers, accountants or clerks. The family farm as it had existed for millenia,
almost disappear-ed in just two generations. Mak illustrates this tendency with
the stories of Jorwerd’s inhabitants, such as the story of a farmer who wanted
to leave his farm to his nephew who had worked with him for over fifteen years,
but who was blocked by his own children who wanted to sell the farm so that
they could equally share in the inheritance.
Jorwerd is a well-written and well-researched document of a phenomenon in
our society that has received way too little attention. Many city-slickers need
only to look back a couple of generations to realise they too come from the
countryside. This is the story of the silent revolution as suffered by the farmers
that experienced the rapid break-up and evaporation of traditions, manners
and work-ethic and -methods that had been kept alive for thousands years. It is
also the story of a ‘Macondo’ in the Dutch countryside, populated with people
that you will not easily forget.
