Josepha Mendels

Dutch teacher, journalist, feminist writer, actor and Paris correspondent for Dutch papers. Her father was Dr. Isidore Mendels (20 December 1861, Den Haag - 1928), a Dutch teacher. He married on 19 September 1895 Emma Levij‏‎ (10 May 1874, Altona, Hamburg - 5 November 1942, Auschwitz). She had an elder sister Ada Mirjam Mendels‏‎ (28 January 1899, Groningen - Aug 1942, Auschwitz), who married Simon Salomon Joseph Slagter (29 Oct 1898, Rotterdam - 3 Augustus 1942, Auschwitz). Her orthodox Jewish father had hoped for a son to pass on his name, and gave her the name Joseph with an a. Her friends called her Jos. She wanted to be an actress. But her educated father opposed this idea and sent her away from her home in Groningen to the modern Middelbare Meisjesschool (MMS) in Deventer (graduated 1920). At the high school for girls she fell in love, but it was with a girl. Later she would have brief affairs with both married man and friendships with females, including the lesbian writer Anna Blaman, with whom she went to Paris (Nov 1951). Back in Groningen (1920), she visited the vocational house-hold school and the training college. She became a teacher in Den Haag and in 1936 journalist in Paris. During WW II, she last her job and started to write a remarkable and for that time period, erotic novel, "Rolein and Ralien (1947)." In 1942 she fled to London via Spain. March 1945 she returned to Paris. She was awarded several Dutch literature prizes. Mendels had an active love-life, independent life style and became a favourite of the feminists for being the first woman to deliberately have a child out of wedlock. Her son was born in 1948 when she was 46. Dutch feminists coined the term "bewust ongehuwde moeder" (BOM, consciously unmarried mother) for it. But in her unorthodox way she could also follow the wish of her father, to pass on the family name, as the rest of her Orthodox-Jewish family was murdered by the Nazis. Her mother, her sister Edith, sister Ada and her brother in law and his two children were all deported to East and gassed in termination camps. Mendels died 10 September 1995 in Eindhoven. Link to Dutch Wikipedia