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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Minco, Marga
Legal name: Menco, Sara
Other names: Faes, Marga
Hoorn, Marga van
Hus
Rebel, J.
Wit, Marga de
Birthdate: 1920-03-31
Date of death: 2023-07-10
Gender: female
Nationality: Netherlands
Country (for map): Netherlands
Birthplace: Ginniken, The Netherlands
Place of death: Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Nederland
Places of residence: Ginniken, The Netherlands
Breda, Netherlands
Amersfoort, Netherlands
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Utrecht, Netherlands
Education: Middelbare Nutsschool voor Meisjes
Occupations: journalist
novelist
drawing teacher
Holocaust survivor
short story writer
Relationships: Voeten, Bert (husband)
Awards and honors: Annie Romeinprijs (1999)
Constantijn Huygensprijs (2005)
Short biography: Marga Minco, née Sara Minco, was born to a Jewish family in Ginneken, The Netherlands. Her parents were Grietje (van Hoorn) and Salomon Minco, a salesman. She had a sister, Bettie, and a brother, David. The family moved to Breda in about 1925. Ms. Minco began writing as a child, and following her graduation from high school, got a job as an apprentice reporter for the Bredasche Courant, where she covered local news and wrote theater and film reviews. After Nazi Germany invaded Holland in World War II in May 1940, Ms. Minco was fired from her job and her family was forced into a Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam. Her parents and both siblings were rounded up and deported by the Nazis. Ms. Minco escaped and went into hiding with her boyfriend Bert Voeten, a poet and translator, and assumed the alias Marga. After the liberation of The Netherlands, Ms. Minco learned that she was the only surviving member of her extended family except for an uncle. Ms. Minco and Voeten married in August 1945 and had two daughters. In 1957, she made her literary debut with a short novel in diary form that remains her best-known work, Het bittere kruid (Bitter Herbs). She took Marga Minco as her pen name. Bitter Herbs was one of the first books about the war and the Holocaust published in The Netherlands, and became a bestseller that has never gone out of print. Besides novels, Ms. Minco also wrote numerous short stories that appeared in Dutch periodicals and were later published in collections such as De andere kant (The Other Side, 1959), Het adres en andere verhalen (The Address and Other Stories, 1976), and Achter de muur (Behind the Wall, 2010). Although she wrote about many other subjects, at times with absurdist and humorous elements, Ms. Minco always returned to her experiences during WWII and the post-war period. She received many awards for individual works, as well as the 1999 Annie Romein Prize, the 2005 Constantijn Huygens Prize, and the 2018 P.C. Hooft Prize, her country's most prestigious literary award, for her entire oeuvre.

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Reviews

Bitter herbs : a little chronicle by Marga Minco

Marga Minco was a young adult when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and she would lose her entire family in the ensuing Holocaust. She wrote pieces of this novel as short stories about her experiences, and in 1957 she put the stories in chronological order and published them as a novel. The book became very popular and acclaimed and was required reading in many schools in the Netherlands. In the novel she is roughly six years younger than she was in real life, but the incidents are based on her life.

Although told in a spare style without excess emotion, I found Bitter Herbs quite touching. The story of her and her brother going to various stores looking for good camping cups to take with them will remain with me.… (more)

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labfs39 | 12 other reviews | May 15, 2024 |

Het bittere kruid. Een kleine kroniek by Marga Minco

Marga Minco is one of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust whose writing strikes a cord. Much of the power of her stories lies in what is not said, or, in the case of Het bittere kruid. Een kleine kroniek, widely considered her masterwork, in the simple observations of a child, without the insight or explanation of the adult writer. This short novel tells the story of survival in hiding.

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edwinbcn | 12 other reviews | Aug 9, 2023 |

Een leeg huis by Marga Minco

Een leeg huis, translated as An Empty House is another novel by the Dutch writer Marga Minco. Written and published after the Second World War, it describes how two young women cope with life after the war. During the last part of the war, the two Jewish girls, Sepha and Yona, were in hiding in the north of the Netherlands, and the first episode of the story is about their return to Amsterdam.

The idea is that they would be going home, but in Amsterdam they find many empty houses. Sepha moves in with her boyfriend, while Yona has no place to go. The story mainly follows the life of Sepha in three episodes, each moments in time. Yona also appears in each episode.

In each episode, Sepha is on the move. She cannot really settle anywhere, nor can she really settle with Mark. She has a place to stay, a house, but no home. She seems happy to follow her impulses. Yona is less fortunate. An unlucky fall into a canal during the first episode, has an eery echo with her fall out of a train, in the last episode. These two cases of falling leave you wondering whether they happened with intent or were they accidental.

The idea of "falling" as a motive and a link to coincidence and misfortune also plays an important role in Minco's novella De val.… (more)

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edwinbcn | 3 other reviews | Mar 4, 2023 |

Het bittere kruid een kleine kroniek by Marga Minco

This very sober and pared-down novella tells the story of a young Jewish girl's experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands, in the simplest possible language and with the least possible explicit emotional input. It's the kind of book that has all its narrative power in the things it doesn't tell us, but which we know are there just under the surface. By not sharing anything about the narrator's fears and griefs, it takes us into them much more strongly than it would if everything had been spelled out.

The story is a lightly fictionalised version of Minco's own experiences — all her family were murdered in the Holocaust, but she was able to escape arrest by a stroke of luck and remained in hiding until the end of the war. She sharpens the focus a bit by making her narrator seem rather younger and more naive than she actually was herself (in reality she was already working as a journalist in May 1940). But it would be unfair to suggest that she was trying to ride in the slipstream of Anne Frank (although her publishers certainly were): this is a very different kind of book, clearly a highly sophisticated piece of literature with a strong message about the gulf that opened up under the ordinary, provincial life the Minco family and their neighbours were living, convinced that "it can't happen here," when it did.… (more)