Dutch · Intermediate
Read Merijntje Gijzen's jeugd: Het verraad in Dutchwith every sentence explained
English title: Merijntje Gijzen's Youth: The Betrayal
A.M. de Jong · 1925
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About the book
Merijntje Gijzen's jeugd: Het verraad by A.M. de Jong was first published in 1925. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under children, historical fiction and young adult. It runs to about 72,000 words.
A little boy with a swollen ankle. A poacher the whole village fears.
Merijntje Gijzen lives in a Catholic village in Brabant, under a great dike, where he is sure his guardian angel and the Devil fight over his soul all day long. One summer evening, punished (he believes) for stealing a ride on the back of a carriage, he sits crying against the dike with a swollen ankle. The man who finds him is Goort Perdams, called “de Kruik” (“the Jug”): poacher, ex-sailor, drinker and brawler.
So begins an unlikely friendship. Merijntje discovers the poacher's cottage full of ferrets, guns and nets, his big dog Pol and an otter that fishes for him; and the Kruik, spurned by the wild Janekee and hunted by a new border guard from Holland, finds a tenderness he never knew he had.
The first volume of A.M. de Jong's best-loved Dutch boyhood saga, Merijntje Gijzen's Youth: The Betrayal (1925) is funny and heartbreaking; it was filmed in 1936 and became a TV series in 1974.
- Author
- A.M. de Jong
- First published
- 1925
- Language
- Dutch
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Children, Historical Fiction, Young Adult
- Length
- About 72,000 words
How it opens
ER lag een blauwe doom over de boomgroepen rond de verre boerderijen, en zwaarmoedig droomde het oude rood der daken daartussen. Diep stond heel de hemel open in een doorzinderd, glanzend azuur, onpeilbaar. Slechts hingen, heel hoog, een paar lange, wonderlik gerekte veren fijnstrepig uitgewaaid. De late zon sproeide een rijpe schijn over de wijdheid der velden rondom, waar het gele koren, zijden glansen vangend, van tedere rillingen doorvaren lag onder de strelende handen van het warme zomerbriesje. De wereld leek wonderlik groot onder die hooggewelfde hemel, groter dan ooit te voren.
Reading Merijntje Gijzen's jeugd: Het verraad in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Dutch feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
