Carry van Bruggen

Born Caroline Lea de Haan in Kloosterveen, the Netherlands, Carry van Bruggen received an Orthodox upbringing. She was the sister of the poet Jacob Israël de Haan. Moving to a suburb of Amsterdam with her family as a child, she experienced her early education as repressive and harbored antagonism toward Jewish traditionalism throughout her life. In 1904, she married Kees van Bruggen, a non-Jewish socialist whose name she adopted. Moving to the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia) with her husband, van Bruggen began reading contemporary Dutch literature broadly, and upon her return to Amsterdam, she contributed articles to several literary journals. She wrote more than twenty books and numerous articles, many of which explore the tension between tradition and modernity, especially as it involves Jewish women, and in her later career, several works of philosophy, which have influenced contemporary Dutch writers and thinkers. Van Bruggen published some of her work using the pseudonym Justine Abbing. She struggled with mental illness during the last years of her life.