Background
Helga Ruebsamen was born on September 4, 1934, in Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). She was the daughter of Philipp Rübsamen and Henderika Bernardina Schrader. When she was six, her family moved to The Hague.
University of Amsterdam,
Helga Ruebsamen attended the University of Amsterdam.
(Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies and Naz...)
Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies and Nazi-occupied Holland, this luminous novel delivers epic themes filtered through the rich imagination of a young girl. Living with her parents on the island of Java in the late 1930s, five-year-old Lulu moves in a magical world of daydreams and island myths. But when one day Lulu innocently describes a scene she stumbled across late one night, the repercussions are felt for many years and across two continents. Called from the sumptuous tropics back to The Hague, with stops in Marseilles, Paris, and London along the way, Lulu’s family is soon forced into hiding as the war approaches. A moving account of a childhood overwhelmed by history, The Song and the Truth is a profound meditation on how the paradox of memory – at once intransigent and elusive – shapes our lives.
https://www.amazon.com/Song-Truth-Vintage-International-ebook/dp/B000XU4UIU/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Song+and+the+Truth+Ruebsamen&qid=1589465212&s=books&sr=1-1
1997
Helga Ruebsamen was born on September 4, 1934, in Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). She was the daughter of Philipp Rübsamen and Henderika Bernardina Schrader. When she was six, her family moved to The Hague.
Helga Ruebsamen attended the University of Amsterdam.
After high school, Helga Ruebsamen takes a job as a journalist at The Hague newspaper Het Vaderland. Between 1964 and 1971, Ruebsamen published four books, after which no writing appeared from her hand for eighteen years. Then, in 1988, she published Op Scheveningen (At Scheveningen), a collection of short stories as striking as they were nostalgic.
Het lied en de waarheid (The Song and the Truth) marks a turning-point in her career: It is her first work to be published in English. From September 1, 2000, to June 30, 2001, she was a Writer-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.
(Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies and Naz...)
1997From 1959 to 1966 Helga Ruebsamen was married to Serein Pfeiffer. From 1969 to 1976 she was married to Klaas de Graaf.