Herman Heijermans
1864–1924
Biography
Herman Heijermans was a Dutch playwright, novelist and writer of sketches, and he is widely regarded as the leading Dutch dramatist of the modern era. He was born in Rotterdam in 1864 into a liberal Jewish family, the eldest son in a household of eleven children. Money troubles at home and a failed business venture in the rag trade pushed him toward writing around 1890. He first made his name as a theatre critic in Amsterdam. In 1893 he staged a one-act play under a Russian-sounding pseudonym, to show that Dutch audiences would applaud a foreigner's play while they had disparaged his own. Once the play had succeeded, he revealed the hoax in a newspaper.
He turned to socialism in the late 1890s and gave his naturalism a political edge, which he described as socialist naturalism. His play The Ghetto, about Jewish identity and social justice, premiered in 1898 and established his reputation as a dramatist. His breakthrough came with The Good Hope (1900), a play that denounced the exploitation of Dutch sea fishermen. It was performed in many countries, from New York to Tokyo, and the attention it drew helped start a campaign for strict inspection of unseaworthy ships, which led a few years later to the Schepenwet, a merchant shipping act of 1909.
Diamantstad, the novel on this site, appeared in 1904, a few years after The Good Hope had made him famous. Heijermans wrote a great deal of prose as well as plays, including novellas, novels and sketch stories, and his concern with working people and social conditions runs through both forms. Readers who know him mainly as a dramatist will find the same interest carried into this novel.
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Books
Diamantstad
by Herman Heijermans
Eli comes back from years at sea to Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, where he grew up among the diamond cutters and polishers. Heijermans paints the crowded streets, the workshops and the households that live by the trade's booms and slumps. This book uses the racial and other slurs…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.