ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: When was Nina’s article about the diaries published in the New York Times, and why did it have an unusual kind of resonance among its readers?

Nina Siegal is a writer from New York who lives in Europe. She has worked as a journalist since the 1990s, and also published three novels. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands for her second novel in 2006, and has lived there since then. Siegal has been a regular freelance contributor to The New York Times from Amsterdam since 2012, covering art and culture, history and society. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including two MacDowell Colony fellowships, and the post-graduate Jack Leggett Fellowship from Iowa. She is a 2021 recipient of the Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, and a Humanity in Action Fellow.

Siegal’s latest book, which was just released in March, is The Diary Keepers: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times – World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It.  It is based on select writings from the archive of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which contains more than two thousand Dutch diaries from World War II.  The book offers an intertwined nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as individuals experienced it day by day.