Ode to Marga MincoFacts from a memory
Marga Minco at the Bijenkorf in Amsterdam, March 28, 1981, Photo Hans van Dijk, Anefo National Archives
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Dear Marga Minco,
We have never met. Our paths did cross. But you were the famous writer of Het Bittere Kruid and so many other stories-and I didn't know I was your future biographer.
We are exactly half a century apart, and because of that we differ in a war. A destruction that can be approached through literature-from the testimonies like Abel Herzberg's to the hiding stories of Anne Frank or Andreas Burnier, or the ironic novels of Arnon Grunberg. But no one writes about them like you do. With you, feelings, memories and thoughts lurk not in the words but in the silences, in the houses, in an empty party room, in a burn hole in a tablecloth. As a result, they are also often spaces that remind me of your work and life. Every time I cycle along the Kloveniersburgwal, I see the house in which you went into hiding and had your first child-the house also where a penniless Lucebert later slept with you on the couch, or was it on the floor?
Type machine Marga Minco, Collection Literary Museum, The Hague, photo Yra van Dijk
When I am in the Oosterpark, I see you and your husband Bert Voeten, young, beautiful and fearless posing in the wide gutter of the Witsen house where you lived for so long, on Leidseplein the society De Kring where you met with artist friends after the war. In Tweede Oosterparkstraat stands the now empty house at number 265, where you raised your daughters, worked in the attic and lived until you died last year, 103 years old. As dejected as the house looks now, it is reminiscent of Kafka's motto you chose for your novel An Empty House (1966): 'Das Haus ansehn. Es ist still, niemand geht ein und aus, man wartet ein wenig, auf der Haus-Seite, dann auf der Seite gegenüber, nichts, solche Häuser sind so viel weiser als die Menschen, die sie anstarren.'
Even now that I am working in Friesland for a while, I think of you a lot. Your story “My Mother's Village” plays not so far from here. The stubborn heads I pass when I cycle around here could be descendants of the “elders” you portrayed in it. The elders who refuse to issue the baptismal certificate that could have saved the mother of the narrator (your mother).
Tweede Oosterparkstraat, photo Yra van Dijk
The train that brought me here runs along the same tracks as the Nazi trains that took your parents, brother Dave and sister Bettie and their loved ones to Westerbork. With such brittle lines between past and present, I and my co-biographer will have to get to work in the coming years. In this we can take an example from your work, in which history is so vividly present and intertwined by flashbacks with the here and now of the telling. We will make do with “facts from a memory,” as you yourself described your work.
Only there, in your oeuvre, can I meet you. The characters in those stories are by no means all marked by war-though each of them seems marked by something. The women (mostly they are women) are witty, full of imagination and headstrong. When I read about them, I deeply regret not having dared to speak to you at the time. I think we could have easily bridged that half-century age difference.
With warm greetings,
Yra van Dijk
Period
1920– 2023
About
Ode by Yra van Dijk to Marga Minco.
Marga Minco
Marga Minco (1920-2023) wrote an unforgettable, still so relevant, widely read classic with her debut Het bittere kruid (1957), which had many translations. Her subsequent novels and novellas, such as An Empty House and The Fall, were also read and loved.