Jan Brokken – författare

The Music of the Netherlands Antilles: Why Eleven Antilleans Knelt before Chopin's Heart is not your usual musical scholarship. In October 1999, eleven Antilleans attended the service held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Frédéric Chopin's death. This service, held in the Warsaw church where the composer's heart is kept in an urn, was an opportunity for these Antilleans to express their debt of gratitude to Chopin, whose influence is central to Antillean music history. Press coverage of this event caused Dutch novelist and author Jan Brokken to start writing this book, based on notes he took while living on Curaçao from 1993 to 2002.Anyone hoping to discover an overlooked chapter of Caribbean music and music history will be amply rewarded with this Dutch-Caribbean perspective on the pan-Caribbean process of creolization. On Curaçao, the history and legacy of slavery shaped culture and music, affecting all of the New World. Brokken's portraits of prominent Dutch Antillean composers are interspersed with cultural and music history. He puts the Dutch Caribbean's contributions into a broader context by also examining the nineteenth-century works by pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans and Manuel Saumell from Cuba. Brokken explores the African component of Dutch Antillean music-examining the history of the rhythm and music known as tambú as well as American jazz pianist Chick Corea's fascination with the tumba rhythm from Curaçao. The book ends with a discussion of how recent Dutch Caribbean adaptations of European dance forms have shifted from a classical approach to contemporary forms of Latin jazz.

The Music of the Netherlands Antilles: Why Eleven Antilleans Knelt before Chopin's Heart is not your usual musical scholarship. In October 1999, eleven Antilleans attended the service held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Frédéric Chopin's death. This service, held in the Warsaw church where the composer's heart is kept in an urn, was an opportunity for these Antilleans to express their debt of gratitude to Chopin, whose influence is central to Antillean music history. Press coverage of this event caused Dutch novelist and author Jan Brokken (b. 1949) to start writing this book, based on notes he took while living on Curaçao from 1993 to 2002.Anyone hoping to discover an overlooked chapter of Caribbean music and music history will be amply rewarded with this Dutch-Caribbean perspective on the pan-Caribbean process of creolization. On Curaçao, the history and legacy of slavery shaped culture and music, affecting all the New World. Brokken's portraits of prominent Dutch Antillean composers are interspersed with cultural and music history. He puts the Dutch Caribbean's contributions into a broader context by also examining the nineteenth-century works by pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans and Manuel Saumell from Cuba. Brokken explores the African component of Dutch Antillean music--examining the history of the rhythm and music known as tambú as well as American jazz pianist Chick Corea's fascination with the tumba rhythm from Curaçao. The book ends with a discussion of how recent Dutch Caribbean adaptations of European dance forms have shifted from a classical approach to contemporary forms of Latin jazz.

The remarkable story of how a consul and his allies helped save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust in one of the greatest rescue operations of the twentieth century.In May 1940, desperate Jewish refugees in Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, faced annihilation in the Holocaust — until an ordinary Dutch man became their saviour.Over a period of ten feverish days, Jan Zwartendijk, the newly appointed Dutch consul, wrote thousands of visas that would ostensibly allow Jews to travel to the Dutch colony of Curaçao on the other side of the world. With the help of Chiune Sugihara, the consul for Japan, while taking great personal and professional risks, Zwartendijk enabled up to 10,000 men, women, and children to escape the country on the Trans-Siberian Express, through Soviet Russia to Japan and then on to China, saving them from the Nazis and the concentration camps.Most of the Jews whom Zwartendijk helped escape survived the war, and they and their descendants settled in America, Canada, Australia, and other countries. Zwartendijk and Sugihara were true heroes, and yet they were both shunned by their own countries after the war, and their courageous, unstinting actions have remained relatively unknown.In The Just, renowned Dutch author Jan Brokken wrests this heroic story from oblivion and traces the journeys of a number of the rescued Jews. This epic narrative shows how, even in life-threatening circumstances, some people make the just choice at the right time. It is a lesson in character and courage.

During a boat trip on the Baltic, Jan Brokken chanced upon Pärnu harbour, on the Estonian coast of the Gulf of Riga. It was an unforgettable introduction to the Baltic lands: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The extraordinary light, the tranquil landscape and the stories he heard there drew him back time and again. In Baltic Souls, Brokken connects the cultural richness and social diversity of the region over the past eight centuries with tales of personal tragedy and a first-hand account of his travels.A remarkable number of talented people have come from this relatively small, sparsely populated area, many of them Jewish in origin. Brokken looks at twenty of those who have left their mark on art and culture worldwide, from filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and philosopher Hannah Arendt in the early decades of the twentieth century to figures of our own time including violinist Gidon Kremer, composer Arvo Pärt and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.Despite fame and success, their lives were overshadowed by sadness and loss. Many left their native countries to escape the Nazis or Communists, while others saw their families all but obliterated in the Second World War or in post-war ethnic cleansing. Brokken describes several lives marred by tyrannical fathers, a theme that holds a personal fascination for him, to judge from his earlier autobiographical books. Many prominent figures, burdened by the past, met a tragic end, like the writer Romain Gary and the painter Mark Rothko who both committed suicide.Brokken weaves together these and other heroic if less well known lives to tell the unsettling story of the Baltic region and its changing fortunes, describing how the different population groups have interfered with each other, taking on the role of oppressor or victim by turns. He is happy to go off on other tracks that lead to new discoveries, investigating, for example, the fate of several Baltic barons and their descendants; owners of vast estates who lorded it over the local population, they became pawns in the far greater power games played by Hitler and Stalin.Until the fall of the Soviet Union, the Baltic countries were part of the Socialist empire. Now that they have regained their independence, local Russians find themselves demoted to the status of second-class citizens. In this absorbing epic, Brokken empathises with these latest victims — they too have left their stamp on the Baltic soul.