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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.

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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

When Jan Brokken was brought to Hotel Spaander by a poet friend in 1981, he knew he’d stumbled on a literary gold mine. Its walls were crammed with artworks from the thousands of artists who had passed through its doors, drawn by the unique light, voluminous Dutch skies and village scenes, but perhaps most of all, the welcoming atmosphere encouraged by its worldly, entrepreneurial owners Leendert and Alida Spaander. Unlike artist cafés in Paris at the time, the hotel was open to women and would see many visit from as far away as the United States. Hotel Spaander’s heyday was brief and would last from 1881 until 1920, when the owners retired. Nevertheless, it continued to draw painters throughout the following decade. In 1932 the construction of the Afsluitdijk, a causeway dam which blocked off access to the North Sea, effectively ended much of Volendam’s seafaring life. During the corona pandemic the hotel finally went out of business. With the gifted eye for detail and atmosphere of a novelist, Brokken gathers twenty-four stories of visiting artists and their art, with colour reproductions of many of the works mentioned. Through their lives, he reconstructs the hotel’s story around the turn of the twentieth century and brings a bygone world, in all its joy, pain, camaraderie and violence, lovingly to life. <ul><li>Immersive narrative non-fiction that combines a moving literary style with art history made personal</li><li>Hotel Spaander has remained largely unknown as an artist’s colony until only recently</li><li>In 2023 Jan Brokken was awarded the Gouden Ganzenveer (the Golden Quill) for his ‘astounding, broad oeuvre’</li></ul>Rights Shared StoriesHayo Deinumhayo@sharedstories.nl

Jan Brokken has written a wonderful book about the Volendammers and the eccentric characters they hosted. […] 
A beautifully illustrated and delightfully readable book.

Jan Brokken’s pen enchants the reader: especially with his captivating outpourings and memories. […] Magnificent intimate portrait.

Writing is Brokken’s calling: he is a story seeker, a treasure hunter.

On a little-known artist’s colony frequented by world-famous painters

De ontdekking van Holland

Each year thousands of tourists flock to the Dutch town of Volendam for its traditional fishing past. Few people know that around the turn of the twentieth century, when only accessible by boat, it was a bustling artist’s colony which inspired the likes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Ivar Kamke, Elizabeth Nourse, Georg Hering, Marianne Stokes, and even Japan’s Crown Prince Hirohito and the writer Marcel Proust.

The Discovery of Holland

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