Dutch novelist Marga Minko, one of the last generation of European Holocaust writers whose works are widely regarded as classic literature, died Monday at her home in Amsterdam. She was 103 years old.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Jessica Voten.
In her book, Ms. Minko describes, based on her own experience, the severe crisis of Jewish life in Holland during World War II. Her first and most famous book, “Het Bittere Kruid”, published in English as “Bitter Herbs”, describes her life as a young woman from the time of the German invasion of Holland in 1940 until after the liberation of Holland in 1945. recorded the life of
In just 89 pages of acerbic prose, she describes the gradual changes in her life as the Jewish community was gradually degraded and dismantled by Nazi persecution. In one scene, she depicts an absurd conversation with her family and the most charming stitches she uses to sew a yellow Star of David onto her clothes to indicate that they are outcasts. talked about.
She used her family’s real names, but other details, including age, were fictitious. For her pseudonym, she ditched her real name Sarah in favor of Marga, one of the pseudonym aliases she used during her stay undercover.
Minko wrote much of the book in diary form when she lived with her parents in Amsterdam, but lost the pages during her escape. After the war, some of them were published in magazines as short stories.
At the time, the heavy toll of the war on the Jewish community was still largely undiscussed. Of the approximately 140,000 Jews registered in Holland before the war, approximately 104,000 were murdered in the Holocaust.
Bitter Herbs was published in full in 1957, became a Dutch bestseller, and is now considered the touchstone of European Holocaust literature. The Dutch edition has never been out of print and the book has been translated into his 20 languages.
“There are a lot of books about war, but many of them carry the burden of the times in which they were written,” says My Spikers, director of Prometheus Books, which helped publish Minko’s subsequent books. To tell. “Fall” (1983) and “The Glass Bridge” (1986) said in this obituary interview. “‘Bitter Herbs’ will remain a classic 100 years from now. If you want to get a feel for what the war was like, this book is truly timeless.”
Minko is often compared to Anne Frank because the protagonist of Bitter Herb is a Jewish girl who lives in hiding, and the book is written with diary-like immediacy. In the Netherlands, “Marga Minko is as well known to older generations as Anne Frank,” said Victor Schiffery, a novel and poetry expert at the Dutch Literature Foundation, in an interview.
Minko also wrote on other subjects, such as her 1959 collection of short stories, The Other Side, which tells a fictional story about a housewife who tries to explain to a detective why she shoplifts. Ms. always went back to her own personal experience. From wartime to postwar.
Spikers said she was influenced by post-war European writers of absurdity, many of whom were poets. Her writing process typically involved scraping her sentences down to the essentials.
“She’s like the Raymond Carver of Dutch literature,” Siffery said. “I omit everything I can omit, but the theme is huge and almost unbearable.”
He added, “What is not said or written is what makes it so powerful.”
Sarah Minko was born on March 31, 1920 in the Dutch village of Gienneken. She was the youngest of three children of traveling salesmen Salomon Minko and Glice Minko-van Hoorn.
From an early age Sarah dreamed of becoming a writer. As soon as the 18-year-old graduated from high school in the nearby city of Breda, she got a job as a reporter-in-training for the local newspaper Bredash Courant, writing reviews and news articles.
In May 1940, shortly after the German invasion, Minko was dismissed from his post because he was Jewish. Her parents believed that the occupation would not be disastrous and did not have the means to escape, so her family remained.
Her sister was the first to be deported along with her husband, followed by her brother and his wife. Forced to emigrate to Amsterdam’s Jewish ghetto, her parents were arrested there in 1943. Minko, who was with him at the time, escaped through the garden fence and hid until the war was over. After the liberation of Holland in 1945, she found herself the only survivor of her extended family, save for one uncle.
After the war ended, Minko married her pre-war boyfriend Bert Feten, a non-Jewish poet who had gone into hiding with her. She was named Minko in 1992 when she passed away. In addition to her daughter, Jessica, a journalist, Minko has another surviving daughter, Betty Voten, who was born in hiding during the Dutch famine in 1944.
“She was always a dumbass,” Jessica Voten said of her mother. “The sparseness of her written words, that’s who she is.
“She always said in many interviews over the years that she wrote about her family because she wanted them to be remembered for longer than they were alive,” Voten added.
Minko’s subsequent books include Nagelaten Dagen (“Inherited Days”), published in 1997. “Storing” (“Disturbance”), 2004. and the 2010 collection of short stories Achter de Muur (“Beyond the Wall”).
She has won many awards for her work, including the prestigious Dutch PC Hooft Prize for Literary Work in 2019. That year, the awarding foundation republished her short story “Het Adres” (“The Address”), first published in 1957. — a shocking story about a girl who returns to her hometown after the war to try to retrieve her family fortune that her mother kept with her neighbors.
The girl finds her mother’s belongings in a strange house, but is rejected by her neighbors and leaves empty-handed. “I was going to forget the address,” she said as the girl walked away from the house. “Of all the things you have to forget, that would be the easiest,” she said.
