L.S.,

Herewith the answers to your questions.

Yes, next month Edith Leerkes and I are going to the United States for two performances. We'll be playing in the Merkin Hall in New York and in the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Looking forward to it.

We last visited New York in 2003. At a private Peter Stuyvesant Gala in the Grand Hyatt, we played a serenade to the new Amsterdam that New York once was, a ballad about the “Jannen” and the “Keezen” who were to find themselves united in the word Yankees.

Chaos is the word we invented for an order that we don't understand. You could also say that about New York. It is a work of art, unintentionally created and build by millions of industrious hands. Everyone in this city is a stranger, and as Aron Grunberg said, where every one is a stranger, no one is strange.

What stays in your mind is in fact not the city but the postcards. You project Central Park, the Twin Towers, Grand Central. The yellow light in which a full house stands in applause. We were so young.

We made our New York debut in 1982, preceded by an “out of town tour” of a few eastern states. We played in the Ambassador Theater on Broadway for seven days.

I evidently thought, he who does not aim higher than to play in our humble land and that which surrounds it, would be depriving New York critics of a source of dislike.

In all immodesty, I recall Samuel Becket telling sculptor Nick Jonk after seeing my show somewhere in France: “this man is the personification of a poem.”

A poem is an individual art form, per definition for the individual. And where does the individual have a better chance than in America? My European incoherent songs were like atoms that caused a chain reaction. One newspaper wrote: “Herman van Veen, a one man apocalypse.” I only remember the good reviews, of course.

Last wrote in my diary: “New York, Prächtig und Fruchtbar, adembenemend.” (New York, beautiful and fertile, breathtaking.)

In 1984 we returned to Carnegie Hall for “In Concert”, a Globenfelt/Frazier Production. In 1990 we played for a congregate of members of the world press in the garden of the United Nations Building.

The day after our performance I was crossing the street when saw a pile of newspapers. My heart skipped a beat. On the front page of the New York Times, 13 September 1990, I read “World Leaders Gather at UN. For Summit Meeting on Children.”

“Herman van Veen of the Netherlands led Dutch Children in Song.” My face, next to the Secretary of State James Baker, and the Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Tack of Vietnam. I proudly called my father and mother.

In 1990 we went to Chicago, Briar Street Theater. In 1995 we did a series in the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse New York where we caused a minor traffic jam. With our last performances many more people wanted to attend than we had space for. Every 5 minutes Anne Geenen, our producer, came to tell us that we were to start another 5 minutes later. Fond memories.

In May, Edith and I will be performing “Child of the Wind,” a tribute to Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a Jewish girl murdered in a German labor camp at the age of 18. She left the world a collection of poems.

The little book literally found me – her poems need not do more than to exist. I accidentally sat on them. Selma's verses describe what she saw and felt, her dreams, her desire that she and her family would one day be people again and not just Jews.

We read and sang her words in Dutch and German synagogues on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Israel, all in favour of the Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in Tel Aviv. As will be our performances in New York and Washington.

Find attached the experiences of Edith in the USA.

Kind regards

Herman van Veen