photo: 2.bp.blogspot.com and foliaweb.nl
Helene Serafia Haasse - a popular Dutch author is perhaps not very well known in other countries.
I learnt about her books thanks to my Dutch teacher who was never tired of listening to our mostly incomprehensible phrases and encouraged us not only to speak (or rather keep on trying to speak) Dutch as often as possible but also introduced us to Dutch culture through music, films, books and theatre.
Hella was born in the Dutch East Indies in 1918. What wonderful childhood it must have been, what fond memories since they inspired her to write most of her books.
Twenty years later she went to the Netherlands to study Scandinavian languages and litterature at the University of Amsterdam. However after a year, in 1939, she quit having realised that the Nazis' philosophy was based on Norwegian sagas she so much loved.
In 1940 she passed the entrance exam to the Theatre School in Amsterdam. She graduated 3 years later.
photo: wuz.it and 1.bp.blogspot.com
Her proper debut was a collection of poems - "Stroomversnelling" but three years later she turned to writing novels (and collecting awards;)).
Forever a stranger was she in Batavia being a child of foreigners but once in the Netherlands she probably had to come to terms with the realisation that it would never be her home either as she grew up elsewhere.
Her story reminds me of a passage from Sarah Turnbull's "Almost French":
"The old Greek on Samos island had warned me. "It's a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures", he'd said. "It's a curse to love two countries". Well, I certainly don't think of living abroad as a curse - I don't think the Greek believed it either. He was just dramatising his dilemma, the feeling of being torn between two places. And this is something I now understand. For an expatriate, the whole matter of "home" is an emotional conundrum riddled with ambiguities and caprice. Paris is my actual home: it's where I live. It can pull at heartstrings with a mere walk down our market street in the morning. But Australia is the home of homesickness and my history - a powerful whirlpool of family and friends, memories and daily trivia that I used to take for granted but now seem somehow remarkable.
Although I understand the French better now, the reality is in France I'm still an outsider."
Hella was a Dutch Karen Blixen;) She left a country which stole her heart but was never too far away from it.
photo: fantascienza.com
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours”
Alan Bennett "The History Boys: The Film"
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