Tree and the Vine

Dola de Jong (1911–2003) was born Dorothea Rosalie de Jong in Arnhem, The Netherlands. She worked as a dancer and a reporter before she fled the country in 1940. Settling first with her husband in Tangiers, she immigrated to the United States. She was the author of sixteen books for adults and children, including The Tree and the Vine and The Field, which won the City of Amsterdam Literature Prize in 1947.

"Whereas Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, notoriously provided a lesbian romance with a happy, or at least hopeful, ending, The Tree and the Vine accomplishes something bolder: It normalizes its characters’ unhappinesses, showing them to be just as complicated as anyone else’s."—The New York Times"A careful and muted lament about the sorrow of restraint."—The Wall Street Journal“Silence lies at the heart of Dola de Jong’s The Tree and the Vine . . . A sharp and erotic domestic drama, sometimes comic yet darkened by the looming Nazi occupation.”—Julian Lucas, Harper’s Magazine"Bea’s inability to face, let alone name, her true sexual desires drives this spare, elegant, and ultimately haunting novel . . . Gehrman’s beautiful new translation returns the book to the spotlight where it belongs . . . a jewel hidden in plain sight."—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review"A tight­ly plotted tour de force and a sig­nif­i­cant mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry nov­el, explor­ing les­bian desire and the nature of our shared human condition."—Jewish Book Council“De Jong makes her narrator a real person, the plain woman over thirty, who does not want to recognize her nature and has brief, dutiful, joyless affairs with men. Therefore, she is always lonely; her little affections and pleasures will never change that. She is not aware of the barrenness of her existence. This silence, this refusal to see, is very touching, and is delicately rendered.”—V.S. Naipaul, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature“This is a compelling little book, beautiful and sensitive. It is something one must read at a single sitting once it is begun, which is why this little gem had to be published.”—The Statesman“This compelling novel allows us entry into a world in which the word lesbian is unspeakable and to be a Jew is unspeakably dangerous.”—Evelyn Torton Beck, editor of Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology“A masterful depiction of the love of two women, one of whom loves without understanding her own sensuality, while the other indulges in passions with little concept of love.”—Johan P. Snapper, University of California, Berkeley