Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates
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Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates is a novel by Mary Mapes Dodge first published in 1865.
In the original tale, The Hero of Haarlem, a nameless Dutch boy saves his country by putting his finger in a leaking dike and stays there all night, in spite of the cold until the adults of the village found him and made the necessary repairs.
In the novel, a class reads out loud the tale. The lead protagonist of the novel is named Hans Brinker (Hansje Brinker in Dutch), which has since become the name associated with the hero of the original tale, though the novel's character participates with his sister in a skating competition and does not plug up a dike.
In the novel, Hans also must deal with the problems of a sick father, a life of poverty and the local children treating him and his sister very poorly. The problems started when a rogue wave nearly destroyed the village, which was saved by Hans' father, the strongest man in the village, holding up the dike, but the force of the water rendered him unconscious, then later incapacitated and unable to support his family. The only child who does not treat Hans and his sister Greta poorly is Peter van Holp, the son of a wealthy family who remember the father saving the village. Hans has a talent for woodcarving, which he is he then requested by the van Holp family to carve wooden trinkets and later cottage decorations, to which he maintains some income. Hans and Greta then learn a famous doctor named Dr. Bochman might be able to treat their father, but he is expensive to hire, and gruff in manner since the loss of his wife and son. Eventually Dr. Bochman is persuaded to examine the Brinker father, in which he finds pressure on his brain which can only be cured by a risky operation involving trephining. The operation is successful, and the Brinker father is restored of health and memory, to which he then unearths a buried strongbox full of money, ending their poverty. Dr. Bochman is also changed of his gruff ways, and refuses payment for his surgery. The ending shows that the Brinker parents lived a very long life, Dr. Bockman backed Hans to go to medical school, in which Hans grew up to become a famous doctor, and that Greta married Peter van Holp and had several children, all of whom became champion ice skaters.
For tourism purposes, a statue of this fictional brave boy has been erected in Spaarndam. This American story is not widely known in the Netherlands and it is a piece of American, rather than Dutch, popular culture or folklore.
Mary Mapes Dodge wrote the story about Hans Brinker after all the stories she had heard about The Netherlands from her Dutch grandmother. She never visited the Netherlands.
