Background
Heijermans was born on December 3, 1864 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, into a liberal Jewish family, the fifth of the 11 children of Herman Heijermans Sr. and Matilda Moses Spiers.
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1904
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1899
Heijermans was born on December 3, 1864 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, into a liberal Jewish family, the fifth of the 11 children of Herman Heijermans Sr. and Matilda Moses Spiers.
Born in Rotterdam, he abandoned commerce for journalism, was founder-editor of De Jonge Gids (1897—1901), and subsequently coeditor of De Nieuwe Tijd. From 1912 he edited another paper in Amsterdam.
"Op hoop van zegen" (“The Good Hope,” 1900), which dramatized the wretched existence of Dutch fishermen, is regarded as his best play and was adapted to the movie screen. Other dramas, such as "Het zevende gebod" (“The Seventh Commandment,” 1903) aroused public indignation because of the author’s antireligious views and belief in free love.
Typical of their day were the works that Heijermans wrote on Jewish themes. "While Ahasverus" (1893), one of his first plays, dealt with Russian Jewish suffering in the contemporary pogroms, "Ghetto" (1899), and the novel "Diamandstad" (1904) contrasted the Amsterdam Jewish quarter’s narrow-mindedness with the tolerance of Christian Netherlanders.
This biting criticism on the part of a left-wing Jewish secularist gave way to a more sympathetic approach in the 660 tales or sketches of Dutch family life which Heijermans published, under the pen name of Samuel Falkland, in De Telegraaf and Het Algemeen andelsblad. First serialized in those Amsterdam dailies (1896-1915), his tales were later collected in book form.
To mark the centenary of his birth, a complete edition of Heijermans’s plays was issued in 1965.
Heijermans was a Dutch writer, notable for his works.
A socialist, whose forte was the portrayal of working-class life, he owed his success to a combination of masterly stage technique, humor and dialect.
