When I was still young and stupid I refused to read books by Carry van Bruggen. I thought her name sounded silly and also titles like The house on the ditch† Eva or Helen suggested a rice pudding mountain of blandness.
I had no idea at the time that she was the sister of Jacob Israël de Haan (Pipelines), one of my favorite writers. They were even born in the same year, both in 1881, I read recently, Carry (Van Bruggen was her husband’s last name) on January 1 and Jacob on December 31. This phenomenon, two children in one year, has been mockingly referred to as ‘Irish twins’, after the rampant procreation of the Catholic Irish.
Carry and Jacob did indeed come from a large family of sixteen children; they were only not Irish Catholic but Orthodox Jewish. In The house on the ditch from 1921 (which, thank God, I finally decided to read) Van Bruggen describes her Jewish childhood in Zaandam. The result is a kind of Jewish variant of Afke’s ten†
‘Where Aunt Froukje goes in the evening, there is a new baby in the crib in the morning. The kieselish (cookies for the festival of Purim, SW), the morour (horseradish, the bitter herb for the Seder evening, SW), the honey and the hafdolo candles Aunt Froukje only brings into the Jewish houses… only there she is also called Aunt Froukje… but she brings the little children just as well into the other houses and there they call her Miss Nathans.’
‘The sign in front of her house also says ‘Miss Nathans’, and there’s another word below it, a very strange word, ‘Deliver.’ Mother used to always say that Aunt Froukje is called that by herself… but last year behind the rain barrel at the Jewish school, tall Levie told me that ‘Verlosk.’ is not a name, but a word, and that it has something to do with the children Aunt Froukje brings.’
A wonderful book, in short, full of astonishing observations of a perceptive child. Immediately afterwards I read Van Bruggens the forsaken (1910) and that cut a little deeper. It reads like a somewhat grim sequel to The little house† a coming of age of four children in an Orthodox Jewish family, Esther, Roosje, Josef and Daniel.
In The little house the children do not yet experience the neat poverty and strict faith as oppressive, but rather as cozy, with the gentle hand of the sweet, compliant mother figure. But in the forsaken the mother dies young, the harmony is gone and the bitter father continues to adhere strictly to the Orthodox precepts while the Jewish community around him becomes more and more worldly and ‘freer’.
Each of the four children reacts in their own way. The good Roosje continues to care for her father faithfully, but her rebellious, beautiful sister Esther (‘Nice cup, for a little Jewess’, according to the mayor) is looking for a way out of the distress. She befriends a rich girl, an only child in a family of non-Jewish upstarts, and spends all her free time there in spite of her father.
Esther, barely 16, meets one of the creepiest dirty old men I’ve ever seen described. ‘Esther shuddered a moment at the touch of that cold, sunken mouth on her softly warm cheek. But… continuously laughing, he rummaged through the inside pocket of his coat and held it out to her. The child cried out… a little gold watch… she grabbed it with both hands, and the old party shivered with delight at that very young childish gesture. His cloudy eyes lit up, and his hand quickly pulled the box away again… ‘For a kiss… on your mouth.’
No, that’s not going to end well.