VANDERBEEK is a good old Dutch name in America. Or rather, a Drenthe name as they hail from Coevorden. Remmelt, son of Jan and grandson of Evert Vanderbeek, did not marry just anyone. His bride was Jannetje Rapalje, third child of America’s Adam and Eve, Joris and Kaatje Rapalje, the first immigrant couple to have children on American soil. She was only 13. Rem himself was a blacksmith and ten years older.
Ask any American if they know a Vanderbeek, and there’s a good chance they will say: yes, James. He’s an actor, played Dawson Leery in Dawson’s Creek, and danced in the widely beloved TV show Dancing with the Stars. James VanderBeek is popular.
But ask the parents of an eight-year-old, and they’ll correct you: it’s Vanderbeeker, they say. Because their child has the book: The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street. Or The Vanderbeekers On The Road, or The Vanderbeekers Ever After. Seven volumes in all, each an absolute bestseller, about a bi-racial family in a Harlem tenement that is threatened with eviction just before Christmas. Written by the daughter of Chinese immigrants in California, therefore raised with no Dutch American family traditions.
And yet the bestsellers are about a family with Dutch roots, in a neighborhood named after Haarlem, in a city that began as New Amsterdam. All seven of them are selling like hot cakes, for children’s books are the only book category with never dipping sales.
WHAT’S remarkable about the success of Karina Yan Glaser’s book is that no one, in any book review, in any comment, finds the family composition remarkable. Karina does not specify which parent is the ethnic minority, nor which skin colors the family members have. But what’s crystal clear is what father’s roots are. The book title is not The Joneses, or the Perezes, no, it is The Vanderbeekers. Immediately recognizable, immediately identifiable.
Everyone in America knows someone whose name starts with Van or Vander. Not everyone knows an O’Brien, or a DiGennaro, or a Schnauzerbacher, but everybody knows a Vander-something. It’s such an all-American name that when the writer woke up in the middle of one night, “I knew the first sentence of my novel and it included the name Vanderbeeker. I’m not sure what was happening in my consciousness to give me that name, but that’s how I got Vanderbeeker.”
The neighbors were in her consciousness, or the neighborhood, her village, the town. There is always a Vander around the corner somewhere in America. A detail that typically escapes most people. But it contributes in no small measure to the success of Karina’s books.
* Click on the map for a 40-second video about the Vanderbeeker family
