About the Author and the Text

Marga Minco (born 1920) is a Dutch writer and journalist. She belonged to a Jewish family in the Netherlands, and she was the only member of her family to survive the Nazi persecution of the Second World War. That loss shapes much of her writing, which is spare, restrained and deeply moving. The Address is one of her best-known short stories.

What the story is about. The Address is a poignant post-war story set in Holland. During the War, the narrator's mother handed over the family's precious possessions to an old acquaintance, Mrs Dorling, who lived at Number 46, Marconi Street, supposedly to keep them safe. After the War, the narrator — the mother's daughter and the family's lone survivor — travels to that address to find her mother's belongings. Mrs Dorling refuses even to recognise her, but on a second visit her teenage daughter lets the narrator in. Surrounded by her mother's furniture, silver, crockery and the familiar table-cloth with its old burn mark, all arranged in a tasteless, oppressive way, the narrator realises that these objects — cut off from the life and the people they once belonged to — have lost all their meaning for her. She decides to leave them behind and resolves to forget the address altogether.

The story is told in the first person by the daughter, and it moves between the post-War present (the two visits to Number 46) and remembered scenes from the War years. The family's Jewish background is signalled quietly — for example, by the Hanukkah candle-holder (a Hebrew festival of lights celebrated in December) that hangs in Mrs Dorling's passage.