When The bitter herb appeared, in 1957, it seemed as if “something broke open,” said the writer Marga Minco, who died this week four years ago, in one of the last interviews she gave. Thanks to that literary work, something broke open in Jewish circles, she added, her circles. And “I don’t know what it was like out there, but the reviews from that time are clear: I had loosened something, held up a mirror to them.” Her small war chronicle confronted the Netherlands with the fate of the Jews, which was neglected after the Second World War.
Because Minco was “angry” when she wrote her debut, because of the indifference with which many Dutch people lived through the fifties. The war was preferably forgotten, out of shame, or with a view to the future. “What were they to do with the Jews who came back from their hiding places and from across the border? They may have felt embarrassed: we weren’t bothered, but they were.”
Writer Marga Minco, born as Sara Menco, was one of the survivors, while her family was murdered in Sobibor and Auschwitz. She was able to escape when the doorbell rang. Her father asked her to get the coats, after which she could walk away through the garden. ‘I gently closed the garden door behind me and ran out into the street’, it says without any frills. The bitter herb. Over the years, in the repeated retelling, the scene acquired an almost mythical quality: how an insignificant everyday act meant the difference between life and death. Thanks to the incomprehensible absurdity of fate. That coincidence and the loneliness already implied in it would become the subjects of her literature.
Delivery as command
Minco died last Monday at the age of 103 and has already been buried in a private circle, her family reported this weekend in an obituary in NRC. With her death, one of the most important war witnesses of Dutch literature disappeared. To survive was her destiny, her literary task became to pass it on – to her chagrin this was unavoidable, for she was also a cheerful woman with a great sense of humour. But in the end, her oeuvre, serrated in tone and modest in size, “allowed readers to experience how people are driven into loneliness by evil forces,” according to the jury of the PC Hooft Prize, which was awarded to her in 2019.
The war did not have to be literally present in her work to leave its traces – that was inevitable. After high school, Minco worked for a while at the Breda Courantuntil she was dismissed as the first Jewish journalist in the Netherlands on May 15, 1940, one day after the capitulation.
After the war, she married the poet Bert Voeten, became the mother of two daughters, and spent years refining what a thin stack of written paper would yield – the anger with which she wrote would be virtually invisible in it. Her enthusiastic, but somewhat hesitant publisher Bert Bakker still managed to turn it into a substantial book, which, against the prevailing mood, became a bestseller. And the quality was recognized: “Not a trace of pathos, not a hint of sentimentality, not an attempt at literature, not a moment of resentment,” it wrote. General Trade Journal. “With extreme caution, everyday things are noted in a very unusual time. That is how the suffering came to an inconspicuous Jewish family, that is how these people have undergone that suffering, almost accepted it.”
After that debut, Minco mainly specialized in short stories, even without the war in them, realistic with absurd elements, alienating in a Kafka-esque way – but thanks to the equally absurd war still imaginable. And it didn’t stop with the experiences from the war. The Jewish couple from ‘Return’ knew: “That it has only just begun for them.” Minco’s story ‘The address’ became famous, about the so-called ‘custodians’, who took over the possessions of Jewish neighbors who had gone into hiding or had been deported, only to not return them after the war, who were deaf to the East Indies. And in the short novel The fall (1983) a woman, who once lived (during the war) by chance, falls down by that same stupid coincidence, and still dies.
Poor survival
This is how history lives on – which has a double meaning, because that survival also determined the bitter necessity of Minco’s oeuvre. By continuing to remember, the past is not completely closed. Her slain family could live on in her stories. Pale perhaps, and distorted by the fictionalization and the wear and tear that time inflicts on memories – Minco was also aware of that inevitability, including in her bouncy, late work days left behind (1997) – but still.
The bitter herb is now regarded as one of the classics of European war literature, and has reached an audience of millions. This was partly due to its modest size, which ensured that many generations of students put it on their reading lists. But don’t forget the quality of the prose: Minco doesn’t use a word too much, and that lack of embellishment creates great dramatic tension. Threat, which the reader can perceive in the innocence of a Jewish family that is given an unlimited number of stars to sew on the clothing. “It’s easy,” says the narrator’s mother. “Now we can keep some in reserve for summer goods.”
objective observer
That clarity was deliberate, Minco knew that she had to be “an objective observer in order to write about it. The topic was already charged enough,” she once said. As a result, her words indeed retained their eloquence. But also because history is never really complete, as became clear when the PC Hooft prize was awarded in 2019. To her horror, the writer then recognized the name of the chairman of the board of the prize, Gillis Dorleijn. He was the grandson of the people who appropriated the possessions of Minco’s murdered parents after the war. The famous story ‘The Address’ was about the ‘Dorling’ family.
“He can’t help it,” Minco responded. But it was also an incident of absurd coincidence that fitted painfully perfectly into Minco’s oeuvre.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on July 15, 2023.