Bitter Herbs: Based on a true story of a Jewish girl in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands (Penguin International Writers S.)

by Marga Minco

‘The evening the men came I fled through the garden gate…’

The Netherlands, World War II

When the Nazis invade the Netherlands in May 1940 it's clear that life is changing for the girl and her family. Step by step, the Nazis close in on the Dutch Jews. But when the authorities finally come to the family home a split decision will have devastating consequences.

Marga Minco’s autobiographical novel Bitter Herbs is a Dutch classic that has been translated into more than fifteen languages. This deceptively simple and profoundly moving tale is now reissued with a new translation by Jeannette K Ringold.

• ISBN10: 1529106494
• ISBN13: 9781529106497
• Publish Date: 17 September 2020 (first published May 1969)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Ebury Publishing
• Imprint: Ebury Press
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 160
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/isbn/9781529106497

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Bitter Herbs is a short semi-autobiographical series of recollections of the WW2 years by Marga Minco who was a young woman in occupied Holland during the war. Originally released in 1957, this reformat and re-release from Penguin on their Ebury Press imprint, it's 128 pages and is available in paperback and ebook formats.

Despite the inevitable comparisons with The Diary of Anne Frank, in a lot of ways this account (with which I was previously unfamiliar) moved and saddened me even more. That's possibly because I read the former when I was a young child and assimilated it before it had the power to horrify me as an adult. There's so much sub-context in this short retelling which is not explicitly written down; the holocaust is not directly referenced, for example. It's the small day-to-day facts of life which are so heartbreakingly retold here which have the power to dismay and shock more than 75 years on. There's a quiet pervasive matter-of-fact sadness to the whole which made this a difficult read for me.

The English translation work by Jeannette K. Ringold is very well done and seamless and manages to capture the guilelessness and unapologetic directness of the original very well.

This would be a good selection for school or public library acquisition, book study groups, classroom units in modern history, holocaust, WW2, and related subjects.

Four stars. Difficult but important reading.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes