AN IMPROBABLE TRAJECTORY

You might say that Harry van der Laan is not cut from the same cloth as the rest of my uncles and aunts. As a lad of 16, he followed the familiar path of Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1953. This farmer’s son, like so many others, was called on to plough fields and pick tobacco. But he soon veered away to study, went off to Cambridge and Princeton and ended up back in the Netherlands as professor of Astronomy at Leiden University.

So, when he set out to write his own memoirs in 2009, he was already long settled back in the old world that had rebounded from the Second World War to become a cultured and successful European Union — more sophisticated and secular than its new world spin-offs. His story, bouncing back off of that 1953 immigration wall loses some nostalgia and picks up the nitty-gritty of modern Dutch sensibility.

Still, these memoirs cover only the shared trajectory of the van der Laans, from Harry’s birth until a couple of years beyond immigration, and his perceptions can’t help but be woven through and through with those of his Dutch Canadian peers.