Marcel Möring: 'I decided not to be what everyone wanted me to be'

When Marcel Möring was eight years old, he rushed home to tell his mother about the game he had been playing in the basement of a block of flats. "I said, 'We discovered the gold of the Jews.' And my mother said, 'What do you mean? You are a Jew.' " Möring smiles. "I didn't know what a Jew was. I remember crying, 'But I don't want to be a Jew. I want to be like everyone else.' "

Möring's maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust. His mother survived because she was smuggled to the Netherlands, where a couple adopted her. Like many Dutch Jews after the war, she did not draw attention to her past.

But for her son it altered everything. "That notion of not knowing what you really are will never leave you. It profoundly affects the way you look at life." Möring pauses, lights up a cigarette. "It's an experience everyone should have."

Not knowing who you are haunts the work of Möring, considered one of the Netherlands' most important writers. His books have a philosophical weight, bursting with references to Wittgenstein, the Kabbala, the Bible, The Iliad, the Talmud. Even Elizabeth David gets a name check.

His novels resonate with a sense of loss. Memory, identity, absence are his themes. If the past is another country, Möring understands our need for border crossings. "I'm a romantic," he says, "but I do have a melancholy disposition. I'm not an optimist. I don't believe things will get better."

Although Möring won't be pigeonholed as a Jewish writer, he admits his fascination for memory and time stems from his family circumstances. "We were a very small family. We hardly had any relics ... no photographs or family heirlooms. It felt like we were dropped as aliens into society in the Fifties. We had to build our own history."

What it sharpened up in Möring himself was that classic writer's position of the outsider looking in. It also led to a dislike of groups. He loved to play tennis but could never bring himself to join a club. He has never joined anything in his life. He says: "After discovering I wasn't like the rest, I never again wanted to be like the rest."

Speaking English with daunting fluency, Möring has impeccable manners. When I throw half a cup of coffee into my handbag, he whips out a neat white handkerchief. With his pink shirt, designer suit and shaved head he has the dapper looks of the late Pim Fortuyn. But their politics could not be further apart. "I've got nothing against dandies," he says of the murdered Rotterdam professor turned politician. "I liked him for his style but disliked him for generalising ... The week before he was shot he told a Dutch newspaper all our biggest problems in the Netherlands are the result of immigration."

Möring shrugs. "Holland is the result of immigration. It's a city-state – a harbour, not a nation. There's no such thing as Dutchness. One of the oldest towns in the Netherlands, Leiden, decided to track down the genealogical records of 10 important families. None of them came from the Netherlands – all were from France, England, Germany, Eastern Europe. Are we denying people the right that we claimed for ourselves two or three centuries ago?"

Möring's own family left Germany a few generations back. His paternal grandfather kept his German passport until the outbreak of the Second World War when, within days, he became a Dutchman. Möring feels no antipathy towards the Germans (and has a strong following in Germany). Similarly, he doesn't eschew certain authors because of their views.

"Céline was a bloody fascist and anti-Semitic bastard, but some of his books are very good," he almost whispers. "I wouldn't want to miss Ezra Pound or [Ernst] Jünger – a German author from the Thirties and a thoroughbred Nazi. You don't have to be a nice person in order to be a good writer."

At about the time Möring learnt he was Jewish, his father gave him the Old Testament. "I strongly identified with all the characters. In six months, it was worn and torn and I asked for a new one. I was the kind of child who would pray and not think this was a monologue but rather a dialogue with God." He laughs. Möring tried living as an orthodox Jew in his twenties, but was "far too liberal and far too left-wing. It's wonderful to surrender to an idea of faith but I will never get it back because I can't be persuaded by it. It's like a fairy tale."

Fairy tales, Möring knows, are hugely seductive. "They are at the root of literature, strike at the heart of what it is about. The attraction is that a fairy tale grasps the reader from the first sentence: 'Once upon a time ...' That's what I want with my books, to drag the reader in."

While Möring's poetic first novel was acclaimed, he hit a national nerve with his next, The Great Longing. The story of three siblings whose parents died in a car crash, it sold over 100,000 copies. As adults, they are connected by their shared past, which one of them reinvents, the second is indifferent to, the third cannot remember. "The point ... is that you can only be a person if you know your past. If you're cut off from your past you will try to discover it or build a story around the void."

The wonderful In Babylon is still more ambitious. A mystery, a family epic, part-ghost story and part-love story, it has many layers, stories within stories. In Babylon tells of a family of wandering Jewish clockmakers. Their journey begins on the Polish-Russian borders in the 17th century, takes in the atomic trials in the US desert, and ends up, via the Netherlands, in Israel.

Yet Möring never writes directly about the Holocaust. He says: "When I was 18 I really wanted to know everything that had happened. I asked my mother. It lasted about five minutes ... After that she couldn't continue telling and I couldn't listen."

His feelings about history are ambiguous. "On the one hand I can't forget and will keep thinking and writing about it. On the other, I think it would be very healthy for western European civilisation slowly to start to regard the Second World War and the Holocaust as a historical fact." He lights another cigarette. "There's no use in longing for Arcadia – that's what The Dream Room is all about."

In The Dream Room, the most autobiographical of Möring's works, 12-year-old David becomes aware that all is not well in his parents' marriage. Like David, Möring discovered cooking as a boy. David's passion is juxtaposed with his father's loss of passion, and the loneliness of his mother.

Möring spends five or six years on each book and never plans them. He was working on another novel when the voices in The Dream Room came to him. "I suddenly had this first paragraph. After two days I had 17 pages." This novella has the feeling of unspoken thoughts. "Silence is a very northern European thing," he muses. "What we don't tell each other creates all kinds of misunderstandings. I'm a great fan of northern European restraint."

Finely restrained, The Dream Room evokes the provisional feeling of life. The young David hopes to become a chef, the grown David is a maker of kites. "In a way, he's a wonderful failure," says Möring enthusiastically. "He decides not to be what everyone wants him to be. It's about doing what you want to do. That's the decision I made at 13, wanting to write. I never wanted to compete with the boys in ties."

Marcel Möring: Biography

Marcel Möring was born in the Netherlands in 1957 in Enschede, near the German border; his family moved in the late Sixties to the northern town of Assen. After winning a national essay-writing competition at the age of 13, he decided to become a writer. On quitting secondary school, he studied Dutch literature at night classes while doing odd jobs. After a stint as a journalist, he published Mendels Erfenis in 1990. His second novel The Great Longing won the AKO Prize (the Dutch equivalent of the Booker). His novella Decay is the Way of All Flesh was followed by the historical novel In Babylon (published in paperback by Flamingo), winner of the Golden Owl award for the best Dutch/Flemish book of 1998. His new novel, The Dream Room, is published this month by Flamingo, in a translation by Stacey Knecht. Marcel Möring lives with his partner and their two children in Rotterdam.