HeyJaredWhat the Women Kept
A granddaughter reads her Oma's journal — and traces three generations of her family across colonial Indonesia, wartime Holland, and beyond.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 3
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- Sep 24, 2026
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- Jul 17, 2026
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The Little Sister (opens the original)
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I found out about Oma’s youngest sister almost by accident. We were in the Netherlands together, one of two trips I took with her in my twenties, and she mentioned in passing that she was going to see her baby sister and the family. I met three of her sisters on those trips. A fourth had already died. The fifth I never met at all. Her name was Georgine Frederique, nicknamed Zusje, a nickname for “little sister” in Dutch. She was the sixth child, born in Pati in March of 1919, into a house that w
Twelve and a Half Years (opens the original)
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In 1919, my great-grandfather Emil died suddenly, leaving his wife Moesje with six young daughters and a pension too thin to raise them alone. She found work running the household of a widowed railway engineer named Johan Hubertus Delgorje, an engineer for the Staatsspoorwegen, the Dutch colonial state railway. He was stationed in Poerwodjo, a small administrative town in Central Java built by the Dutch on a Javanese template, its regent and a Dutch assistant-regent running the town side by side
A Habit of Puccini (opens the original)
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Moesje’s favorite opera was Madame Butterfly. Oma remembers her singing it around the house — pieces of it, over and over, in the years before the story became audible in some other way.She had the training for it. Sent to a convent school in Leuven, then Brussels, at her father’s insistence, and from there to the Conservatoire, because she had a beautiful voice and Nicolaas Pièrie believed in doing things properly. Cio-Cio-San was in her range — and possibly in her moment, too. Madame Butterfly
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