![]() ![]() Otto Frank was a German Jew, born in Frankfurt and raised in wealth: his father was the president of a bank that bore his name. Amsterdam was now, as it had been in different eras in the past, a famously liberal place: tolerant, relatively speaking, and a city whose planners had adopted quality of life for ordinary people as part of their program. Jews were also emigrating to the city from other parts of Europe. Socialism and humanism were of much greater importance.” “We may have been Jews,” he said, “but we were not religious at all. Overall, he said, the atmosphere in their household was secular and progressive, which matched that of many Amsterdam Jews. Benno, the youngest of the three, later remembered being aware in the schoolyard that he knew colossally more than his classmates knew about the human body and what people did in their bedrooms. It also helped that he enlisted the aid of Floor Wibaut, whose advocacy of sexual reform and women’s rights dated from his reading Multatuli in his early years.Īt home, meanwhile, Bernard and Rosalie had three children, and when the time was right Rosalie taught them frankly about sex using her husband’s books. It was all quite shocking to the prevailing conservative culture, but Bernard Premsela maintained a serious, dignified persona, and he pulled it off. He wrote a series of books with titles that sound more like they were written in the 1970s than the 1930s: Sexual Education for Our Children. For by now he was interested not just in birth control but in sex as a means of personal growth and liberation. The next year he held a public event at the American Hotel-one of the big new structures that architecturally defined the city’s new golden age-at which people discreetly submitted questions about sex to him in writing. After Jacobs’s death in 1929, Premsela helped to found the Aletta Jacobs House, a family planning clinic, and became its director. He believed that equality between the sexes should be a goal of society and that birth control was a tool to achieve this, for it helped protect women against, as he said, the “excessive procreative demands” of men. As a socialist, he saw it initially as a way to help lift people out of poverty, but as his ideas expanded he concentrated more on women. He chose to become a sexologist.įollowing Aletta Jacobs, he focused first on birth control. He decided to specialize in something that almost didn’t exist. ![]() He came under the influence of Aletta Jacobs, and in this expansive, liberal era he became consumed by thoughts of sex: that is, he realized that gender differences, sexual urges, and the act of sex constituted a large portion of what it meant to be human, and yet society had caged and perverted this vast and undeniable force. In the same year that they married, 1913, Bernard Premsela got his medical degree. Meanwhile, another son of a Jewish diamond cutter, whose name was Bernard Premsela, fell in love with a girl named Rosalie, married her, and moved with her to an address just across the river, in what is now called Spinozastraat. Frieda spent her girlhood in the embrace of her extended family, living a few blocks from both sets of grandparents. In 1925 they had a daughter whom they named Frieda, and the little family moved to the Zuider Amstellaan, or Southern Amstel Avenue, one of the wide boulevards that Berlage had laid out. They married, and the young man, who had an artistic sensibility, began to work with fabric and window design for shops. The boy from the one family, whose name was Joël Brommet, fell in love with Rebecca Ritmeester, the girl from the other. One couple in particular moved to Sapphire Street. A cluster of streets preserves the memory of the time in their names: Topaz Street, Diamond Street, Emerald Square. Of course, many of the Jews who moved into the new district were diamond workers. The stories of three families may give a sense of this hopeful, newly expansive, but brief moment of the city’s history.
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