From Ants to Entrepreneurs: Amsterdam Stories of Humour, Heritage, and Human Connection

Last night, I found myself caught between the mundane and the mythic. Hasna, my housekeeper, handed me a bag of ant persuasion; a “gentle magic” meant to coax the ants in my house to find a new spot. Before she left, she spoke of Sulayman, the prophet who could talk to animals. Her story lingered in my mind and, perhaps, kept me from using the poison. The ants still roam freely through my annexes—a small testament to the power of persuasion over force, of myth over mere utility.

Later, I was swept into the shadowy worlds of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Courier, films that left me teary—not for their plots but for the way they revealed how, beneath the machinery of history, it is always individuals who matter.

Even at Mother’s Day lunch, as the conversation circled endlessly around business, numbers, and more numbers, I was struck by this: behind every calculation, deal, and ” system” there is always a person who makes and breaks.

Some fathers pass down heirlooms; mine passed down jokes—the tales of Sam and Moos, two legendary Amsterdam wiseguys forever scheming and surviving with a wink. My father, director of the Kwantum Hallen, was a master of these tales. He’d tell them to the workers on the warehouse floor, in the break room, even on the road as we travelled from one store to another. The punchlines, always delivered with a conspiratorial grin, could send the staff into fits of laughter and my mother into mild horror.

Dad’s world was business, but never just numbers. He handled marketing, advertising, and sponsorships, but he also knew every worker’s name, their stories, and the best way to make them laugh. He was a knitting needle, quietly stitching together the fabric of the company, making sure no thread was left dangling.

Even Joop Steenbergen, the famously moustache-averse owner, had to admire how my father could turn a warehouse into a community. They were both traders at heart: Joop, clever with wood, curtains and concepts; my father, who started out selling women’s sanitary products door-to-door after the war, pushing a cart through battered neighbourhoods and building trust one doorstep at a time.

And then there are the real heroes—the “knitting needles” of society. Not the ones on magazine covers or in history books, but those who, stitch by stitch, knit the fabric that holds us together. The teachers, caregivers, gardeners, and Hasnas of the world. The wool for the population: soft, resilient, often overlooked, but absolutely essential. Without them, the grand designs unravel.

I remember the trips my father and I took together—the endless Dutch highways, the stories shared over sandwiches in roadside cafés, and the occasional stop to watch a duck float serenely on a canal. That word for floating duck (drijfsijsie) always made me smile. It wasn’t Yiddish, but it belonged to the secret language of Amsterdam, a city where every street corner holds a memory and every accent carries a history.

This brings me to my own roots. I was born in Amsterdam, and my accent (outside my mother’s hearing range) was coloured by Yiddish words; Mazzel mazal (luck), Mokum makom (place), Mesjogge meshugge (crazy), remnants of a city and a culture shaped by centuries of Jewish presence.

As I grew, I found myself both fascinated and uncomfortable with the legacy of Jewish banking dynasties like the Rothschilds.

Their story is complex: Rising from the Frankfurt ghetto, the Rothschilds built the first international banking network, pioneering cross-border finance and shaping the modern world. Their influence on European industry, politics, and philanthropy is undeniable, but so is the shadow cast by the systems they helped create—a world where credit, appearance, and the selling of one’s soul can seem like tickets to belonging.

It’s easy to fall into caricature or conspiracy, but the real legacy is more nuanced. The Rothschilds’ ascent was driven by both necessity and ingenuity, their Jewish identity as much a source of exclusion as of solidarity. The myth of control—of “magic” behind the scenes—often says more about our collective anxieties than about the facts themselves.

At home, no business talks were allowed, and money should not be mentioned; it was a tool, and real prosperity was measured in knowledge and finesse. Yet outside, I grew up with that Amsterdam accent, peppered with Yiddish words and the scepticism that comes from knowing how the world’s systems really work. The seductive dangers of believing in magic solutions, whether in finance or in a bag of “ant persuasion.”

What I keep circling back to, whether thinking of ants or bankers, prophets or parents, is this: the world is built from countless individuals, each with their own story. Systems matter, but the choices of people—sometimes gentle, sometimes ruthless—shape the world we inherit. And among them, the knitting needles quietly stitch us all together.

Now, as I watch the ants roam freely, I think of Sulayman, the prophet who spoke to animals, and wonder about the real magic that binds us. Is it power, persuasion, or simply the refusal to poison what we don’t understand? Maybe it’s humour- the kind my father wielded so well- that keeps us human, connects us across divides, and stitches us together, one joke at a time.

May Harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra

P.S. “The way I see it, WE can do whatever WE want!” (Venom to Eddy)