Terekam dalam buku ini suka-duka sehari-hari orang Indonesia yang pernah merantau di Negeri Belanda dari 1600 - 1950. Mereka berasal dari berbagai kalangan, dari bangsawan sampai babu. Kisah kehidupan mereka ditulis dengan gaya bertutur sehingga nikmat dibaca seolah novel. Ambil misal duka-cerita upaya awal penerbitan majalah Bintang Hindia yang dikelola oleh Abdul Rivai, cerita tragis kehidupan penyair-politikus Noto Soeroto, termasuk kisah duka para babu dan pelaut di negeri orang. Buku ini dilengkapi juga dengan foto, gambar, sajak, kliping koran dan majalah, teks pidato, kop majalah dan suratkabar, kartu undangan, kartu ucapan selamat, sampai bon makanan. Berkat bahan-bahan ini pembaca seolah kembali ke masa-masa kolonial di negeri Belanda.
Author
Harry A. Poeze is a senior researcher at KITLV working on the Project ‘Dutch Military Operations in Indonesia 1945-1950’ in a general supervisory and advisory capacity, contributing his expertise on developments in Indonesian politics and the Indonesian armed forces. Harry studied Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated in 1972. In 1976 he obtained his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the biography of the Indonesian political leader Tan Malaka. At that time Harry was an alderman in the local government of Castricum. Later he became head of the KITLV Publications Department (1981), which has since developed into the KITLV Press. Since 2010 he was senior publisher with the Press, and now, in retirement, a senior researcher at KITLV. His research interest is in the developments in the Indonesian political world since 1900, during Dutch colonial rule, the Japanese occupation, and the Indonesian Revolution in particular. He published a three-volume history of the Indonesian Left during the Indonesian Revolution, concentrating on the role of Tan Malaka, in 2007. Currently he is working on a publication about Indonesian political songs (1925-1965), the (revised) biography of Tan Malaka till 1945, and a monograph on Boven-Digoel, the Dutch colonial internment camp for political prisoners.
