Her mother, German by birth, was in poor health, so Dola often stayed with an ‘aunt Mathilde’ in Haarlem.

Her father wanted to send her to a finishing school in Lausanne, “but I was a rebel,” she said, “I always have been.”[5] 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.

[6] To fund her dance lessons, de Jong started working as a freelance journalist, writing under the pseudonym Sourit Ballon.

[4] While many around her were in denial of the growing threat to the east, de Jong was quick to realize that the Netherlands was no longer safe for Jewish people.

Along with her writing, de Jong worked as a literary agent for publishing houses, resulting in the U.S. publications of Anne Frank, Hugo Claus, Jan Cremer, etc.

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.

She left New York in 1995 to live in a nursing home in Laguna Woods, California, not far from her son Ian.