Dola de Jong

Dola de Jong (10 October 1911 - 12 November 2003) was a Jewish Dutch-American writer. She is most well-known for her publication of The Tree and the Vine in 1954, which depicts a lesbian relationship.

Personal life and education Dola de Jong was born Dorothea Rosalie de Jong in 1911 in Arnhem, The Netherlands, to a wealthy Jewish father, Salomon Louis de Jong, and a German mother, Lotte Rosalie Benjamin.

De Jong had two brothers. She owes her name to her older brother Hans, who changed Dorothea (or Dora) into Dola. Her mother, German by birth, was in poor health, so Dola often stayed with an ‘aunt Mathilde’ in Haarlem. Her mother died when Dola was five years old.

As a young woman, she aspired to become a ballet dancer, but her conservative father viewed ballet as “one step away from prostitution,” as she told Het Parool in a 1982 interview. Her father wanted to send her to a finishing school in Lausanne, “but I was a rebel,” she said, “I always have been.”

Instead, she took a job at a local newspaper, Nieuwe Arnhemsche Courant. When the newspaper went bankrupt, de Jong moved to Amsterdam in the early 1930s where she started taking dance lessons. She became a member of the Royal Dutch Ballet for eight years and toured the Netherlands with the Yvonne Georgi. To fund her dance lessons, de Jong started working as a freelance journalist, writing under the pseudonym Sourit Ballon. During this time, she also published some children's books. She later divorced Hoowij and married her second husband, Robert Joseph. Together they had one son, Ian, in 1951. Instead, it normalizes the characters’ unhappinesses, showing them to be just as complicated as anyone else’s, despite sexuality. Because of its setting, it's possible de Jong drew on her own life to write this novel. Before its publication in the Netherlands, it was rejected as “unpublishable” and “shameless.” To publish in America, it took the intervention of distinguished friends abroad, including de Jong’s American editor, Maxwell Perkins, to get the novel into print. When it first appeared in English in 1961, reviewers likewise misread this subtle character study, bizarrely, as trash about “compulsive sin” and “the world of the sexual pervert,” Lillian Faderman noted in a later reissue.

The Tree and the Vine was reissued by the Feminist Press in 1996.

Death Dola de Jong started to have heart problems in the 1980s, and was diagnosed with cancer of the bone marrow in 1995. She left New York in 1995 to live in a nursing home in Laguna Woods, California, not far from her son Ian.

Dola died in California on November 12, 2003, at 92.

Notable works

1936 or 1938 – Tussen huis en horizon English: Between Home and Horizon (1962) 1939 – Van Klaas Vaak en zijn brave zandkaboutertjes English: Sand for the Sandmen (1946) 1940 – En de akker is de wereld English: And the Field is the World (1945) 1940 or 1942 – Knikkernik, Knakkernak en Knokkernok English: Nikkernik, Nakkernak and Nokkernok (1942) 1943 – The Level Land 1946 – The Picture Story of Holland 1947 – Return to the Level Land 1954 – De thuiswacht English: The Tree and the Vine (1961, tr. Ilona Kinzer; 2020, tr. Kristen Gehrman) 1960 – By Marvelous Agreement 1962 – The House on Charlton Street 1963 – One Summer’s Secret 1964 – The Whirligig of Time