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He gained international fame with The Rainbird, The Blind Passengers, My Little Madness, Baltic Souls, In the House of the Poet, The Reprisal and The Cossack Garden. He is renowned as a masterful storyteller. The New York Times praised his book Jungle Rudy (trs. Sam Garrett) on Rudy Truffino, who mapped the Venezuelan jungle, as ‘a masterpiece of narrative non-fiction’.

Jan Brokken

Jan Brokken has wrested from oblivion the heroic story of Rotterdammer Jan Zwartendijk (1896-1976), a director of Philips who suddenly found himself honorary consul in Kaunas. At the time this was the capital of Lithuania and it was on the point of being annexed by the Soviets. A cross between fellow businessman Oskar Schindler and the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Zwartendijk seized a precious window of just ten days to feverishly write out thousands of visas and thereby rescue as many Jews as he could from the Holocaust. Together with the Dutch Ambassador in Riga and the consul for Japan, an unlikely ally, he enabled these refugees to cross Soviet Russia to Vladivostok, to Japan, and then on to freedom.Part rescue story, part moving portrait of a close-knit family under very difficult circumstances, The Just offers a vivid picture of Eastern Europe during the war and traces the life-stories of the rescued Jews, many of whom Brokken was able to find and speak with. In 1997, Zwartendijk was posthumously bestowed the Yad Vashem honorary title ‘Righteous Among Nations’ for his large-scale rescue mission. A monument was unveiled in Kaunas in the summer of 2018.Jan Brokken has an impressive oeuvre to his name of well-documented, narrative non-fiction books, which read as novels. In all his works, he examines what makes some people behave in a cowardly fashion, while others demonstrate unexpected courage and determination.In The Just, Brokken’s personal fascination for making the right choice at the right time is evident. He writes, ‘In a fraction of a second you have to decide. How do you react? I wouldn’t know, myself, and maybe that’s what made me burrow into this history like a mole.’ Once again, his book provides a lesson in courage.

Reviews

Book

Non-Fiction

De rechtvaardigen

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Dutch consul in Lithuania found a way to save the lives of thousands of Jewish people who had fled Poland, by giving them visas for the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. Visas in hand, the refugees were able to take the Trans-Siberian railway to Japan and then disperse to all four corners of the globe. The vast majority of them survived the war.

The Just

Dostoyevsky’s sentence is commuted to four years’ forced labour in Siberia. There, by chance, he meets Von Wrangel, now Officer of Justice. After Dostoyevsky is freed, Von Wrangel takes him into his own home. In The Cossack Garden, Jan Brokken tells the story of the special friendship that grows between the writer and the young baron.The book’s title comes from the name of the dacha where the friends spend much of the summers, talking, smoking, discussing Hegel and Kant, reading, and supporting one another in the tragedies of love, both being chronically attracted to the wrong women.Most importantly, Von Wrangel encourages his friend to write again, specifically about his experiences of forced labour; the result, Notes From Underground, later formed the basis of his famous novels, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, which show Dostoyevsky’s ability to withstand trials, without bitterness and self-pity, and even at times, with humour.Jan Brokken has an impressive oeuvre to his name of well-documented, narrative non-fiction, which read as novels. The Cossack Garden arose from his earlier bestseller Baltic Souls, in which he tells the story of fifteen families, one of which was the Von Wrangels; in the course of his research, a Von Wrangel descendant showed him the unpublished memoirs and letters of Baron Alexander.

Jan Brokken’s characters are as alive and true, as is his ability to describe the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Russia. Brokken gives a moving image of a special male friendship in Russia at the time.

Brokken places the tragedy of the writer in the context of nineteenth- century Czarist Russia, in all its corruption, cruelty and suppression.

De kozakkentuin

St Petersburg, 21 December 1849, and a man in his late twenties in a white shirt stands in front of a firing squad in the cold. He kisses the silver crucifix held to his lips by a priest, in the sure knowledge that he is about to die. Just before the command ‘Fire!’ is given, a pardon arrives from the Czar. The white-shirted man is the writer Fyodor Mikhaelovich Dostoyevsky. Alexander von Wrangel, a student, eleven years younger, is a witness.

The Cossack Garden

He only ever knew his mother as a pastor’s wife in a traditional village in Holland. After his parents’ death, his aunt hands him the letters and photographs that her sister Olga had sent her from abroad. In tender, sensitive and tentative fashion, Brokken searches these letters for the woman who, during her life, had always remained a stranger to him. Who was she before becoming his mother? What inspired her, what did she think about?Olga turns out to be much more liberated and idealistic than he remembers. She enjoyed learning foreign languages, had in-depth discussions with intellectuals and connected, by giving sewing lessons, with the women around her. Brokken, who has a number of wonderful books about music to his name, interweaves his journey with the life story of Lithuanian composer Leopold Godowsky, who fell under the spell of Indonesian gamelan music.

Brokken brings every sentence to life. 'The Gardens of Buitenzorg' is vintage non-fiction by an internationally esteemed craftsman.

Jan Brokken travels through history and comes home.

De tuinen van Buitenzorg

Long before Jan Brokken (1949) was born, his parents lived in Indonesia, a Dutch colony at the time. Brokken never knew much about that part of his parents’ past.

The Gardens of Buitenzorg

History is a story only in retrospect; only afterwards can we detect threads and patterns. Those in its midst tend to experi­ence events as a great chaos, a storm in which they struggle to keep their footing, in which good and evil are all too relative and the occasional bright flash illuminates what lies ahead. The central characters in The Reprisal are no exception.Brokken focuses on a handful of houses now buried under the asphalt of a motor­way and examines a specific moment, on the evening of 10 October 1944, when a group of German soldiers walked home with their village sweethearts. One of them tripped over a loose cable and was electro­cuted. The reaction of the occupying forces was brutal: seven villagers were summarily executed, their wives and children chased out of their houses, and all their property and possessions set ablaze. It left the village silent and stunned. To this day reproaches smoulder beneath the surface. Who was responsible for the loose cable? Was it indeed an act of sabotage or could it have been simply an accident?Brokken, who grew up in the village, reconstructs the incident in detail based on thousands of court documents, witness statements and interviews. He is the best kind of narrator, calm and honest. The book reads like a detective novel with countless unexpected twists and turns, except that everything in it really happened. Brokken reconstructs not only the attack – for that is undoubtedly what it was – but the entire social environment in which everyone was trying to survive the war in his or her own way: farmers sheltering those in hiding, resistance fighters, and village women who entered into relationships with German soldiers, whether of their own initiative or as a result of abject poverty.

'The Reprisal' presents a penetrating and detailed picture of Rhoon in the final years of the war.

In The Reprisal a curtain is drawn aside to allow us a long and intense look at what went on. Nothing is quite how we always imagined. The story is grim, but because Brokken has traced the ordinary life of 1944 so convincingly and in such detail, it is also profoundly human. The book gnaws away at the reader long after it ends.<ul><li>In its tone, composition and integrity, and from a historical point of view as well, this is an extraordinary book.</li><li>The kind of historical fieldwork that ought to be undertaken more often.</li></ul>

The many lively details create an effect that approaches that of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. The war becomes a here-and-now, freed of the orderliness and easy judgements projected onto it in retrospect.

Brokken is fascinating in his description of how a trauma has divided a small community right up to the present day.

De vergelding

'The Reprisal' is an unforgettable examina­tion in microcosm of the Second World War and everything connected with it: murder and arson, poverty and betrayal, heroic courage and illusions of happiness. Continually deliberating and investigat­ing, Brokken takes us with him into the underworld of a small Dutch village during the German occupation, ultimately raising more questions than he answers.

The Reprisal

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