Read Op hoop van zegen in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Op hoop van zegen by Herman Heijermans was first published in 1900. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 24,200 words.

The sea gives the village its bread. The sea takes its sons. And a rotten ship is about to sail.

In a fishing village on the Dutch coast, the widow Kniertje has already lost her husband and two sons to the waves. Two boys are left: hot-headed Geert, just back from six months' navy punishment for hitting a superior, and young Barend, who is terrified of the water.

The season's work waits aboard the Op Hoop van Zegen — “In Hope of Blessing” — owned by the prosperous shipowner Bos. But rumours run along the quay that the old vessel is far from sound. As love, poverty and pride collide, a mother must weigh her sons' fears against the family's daily bread.

Herman Heijermans' four-act drama of 1900 became the most famous Dutch play of its era, helped spur new laws on ship safety, and was filmed in 1918 and 1986. Its bitter line — the fish is dearly paid for — is quoted to this day.

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.