Dutch and Jewish in the West Indies - From All Their Habitations - Excerpt

Judaism, Spring, 2002 by Manfred Wolf

FOR ME, THE MAJOR EVENT OF 1946 WAS WINNING THE Neerlandia Prize, the award for best student of Dutch in my high school in Curacao.

I was eleven years old and, in this Caribbean setting, liked all things Dutch, even our special ceremonies at school. On the day of the prize awards, after the Dutch National Anthem, after a tableau vivant of Queen Wilhelmina returning in triumph from exile in England to the Netherlands at the end of the war a year ago, after a few hearty choruses of Dutch songs, the principal got ready to announce the winner. He stood up, tugged at his black tie, and ran his fingers through his gray hair. Now, his red face cocked to one side, his horn-rimmed glasses blinking in the stagelights, he spoke my name with a flourish. I walked quickly to the center of the stage and shook his hand, and with a crooked smile, he handed me a book and said, "Treasure this." Then he announced that the Neerlandia Prize winner would declaim a poem. I stepped forward and recited an old Dutch classic I had prepared:

He gazed and said,
Farewell, oh mother,
never to return, never more.
And over dusty roads she saw him go,
and wept her bitter tears--
till one day a leprous drifter
came after many years
and knocked on her door,
and from too great joy
she had no further tears.

Ear-shattering applause, as much from pleasure in the performance as relief that it was over--the boys were excited and restless. For this occasion, girls were present too, though they sat with their school on the other side of the auditorium. Black, white, and brown children filled the hall. Back in my seat I was clapped on the shoulder by several boys. Curacaoan children especially liked the poetry but wondered at its strange contents. The kid sitting next to me asked, "A leper, man, a leper came to the door? Is this some kind of Dutch thing? Are there lepers in Holland?" My friend Mundi grinned. "Wolf, why does the mother first let him go, then welcome him back? Dutch people never make sense."

The principal now leaped forward. He was an energetic man, with a large, gray forelock, who spoke his words lustily: "This great language of ours ennobles these youthful voices. Let us not forget that you, the audience, are ennobled by the words you have heard recited so powerfully. When language is shaped into poetry, when words become music, all of us stand in awe, all of us feel consummate pride. Let us hope, let us devoutly wish, that the day won't come when Dutch will cease to be spoken on these beautiful islands. The flag, the crown, the mother-tongue--these protect and strengthen us forever. Now we shall sing 'Sturdy Boys.'"

Sturdy boys, stalwart lads,
don't stand idling over there.
Have you all your wits about you,
and your senses fully in your care?

I thought of Holland: the sturdy boys, with their wits about them--I had read about them often and wished to be one of them. Not the timid, fearful boy also present in the song, Jan Dullard, who walks around dreamily in his slippers, but Jan Courage who chooses the "rigging" and the open sea, proud of his country and his bravery--perhaps I could have been Jan Courage if we had been able to stay in Holland. Here on this island in this murky heat. I was beginning to doubt whether I could be the Dutch sailor boy, considering my refugee circumstances and Jewish family. We had fled, we had lost our home, we were weak: above all, we were different. Did Jan Courage have a grandfather who bowed to the east?

I had longed for this prize, dreamed of it, worked for it. The award would prove how Dutch I was--not like the Yiddish-speaking refugees I felt little kinship with, people like my grandparents who were utterly different from what I wanted to be. Even my Dutch-speaking parents had been born elsewhere. Though I was a refugee, and always had to explain that we were "naturalized Dutch," I was at least Dutch enough to win a language prize.

The more I could be like other Dutch children here, the more I could leave the worry and anxiety, the unseemly insecurity of being a Jewish refugee, behind me. I remembered the bombardment near our house in Bilthoven, remembered our flight to France with its sudden panics and sudden departures. In Europe, for several years before our arrival in Curacao in 1944, I had not been allowed to mingle with other children. We always had to move on, and I had always been urged to be careful. Feeling the tension in my parents, hearing that the time was not right for games or fun, I longed for an ordinary life, as normal a Dutch childhood as I could have outside of Holland.

In Curacao, I made friends with a number of Dutch boys. Peter and Henny were eleven also, and Henny especially had an enviable family. His father and he were building a guitar together, something I could never imagine doing with my father. Their next project would be a sailboat. Being around them made me happy -- and a little envious.

"You did this well, Manny," beamed my mother, who could smile and look serious at the same time. My father, sitting in a large chair, looked at a space above my head and spoke dreamily: "You can never go wrong with education. You boys need to study for a profession, because business people are always vulnerable in a war."