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Summary
Summary
A family history of surpassing beauty and power: Ian Buruma's account of his grandparents' enduring love through the terror and separation of two world wars
During the almost six years England was at war with Nazi Germany, Winifred and Bernard Schlesinger, Ian Buruma's grandparents, and the film director John Schlesinger's parents, were, like so many others, thoroughly sundered from each other. Their only recourse was to write letters back and forth. And write they did, often every day. In a way they were just picking up where they left off in 1918, at the end of their first long separation because of the Great War that swept Bernard away to some of Europe's bloodiest battlefields. The thousands of letters between them were part of an inheritance that ultimately came into the hands of their grandson, Ian Buruma. Now, in a labor of love that is also a powerful act of artistic creation, Ian Buruma has woven his own voice in with theirs to provide the context and counterpoint necessary to bring to life, not just a remarkable marriage, but a class, and an age.
Winifred and Bernard inherited the high European cultural ideals and attitudes that came of being born into prosperous German-Jewish émigré families. To young Ian, who would visit from Holland every Christmas, they seemed the very essence of England, their spacious Berkshire estate the model of genteel English country life at its most pleasant and refined. It wasn't until years later that he discovered how much more there was to the story.
At its heart, Their Promised Land is the story of cultural assimilation. The Schlesingers were very British in the way their relatives in Germany were very German, until Hitler destroyed that option. The problems of being Jewish and facing anti-Semitism even in the country they loved were met with a kind of stoic discretion. But they showed solidarity when it mattered most. As the shadows of war lengthened again, the Schlesingers mounted a remarkable effort, which Ian Buruma describes movingly, to rescue twelve Jewish children from the Nazis and see to their upkeep in England.
Many are the books that do bad marriages justice; precious few books take readers inside a good marriage. In Their Promised Land , Buruma has done just that; introducing us to a couple whose love was sustaining through the darkest hours of the century.
Look for Ian's new book, A Tokyo Romance , in March, 2018.
Author Notes
Ian Buruma is the Paul W. Williams Professor at Bard College. His previous books include Year Zero , The China Lover , Murder in Amsterdam , Occidentalism , God's Dust , Behind the Mask , The Wages of Guilt , Bad Elements , and Taming the Gods . His newest book, A Tokyo Romance , will be on sale 3/6/2018.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Buruma (Year Zero: A History of 1945) delivers a moving, intimate portrait of his grandparents, Bernard and Winifred "Win" Schlesinger (the parents of film director John Schlesinger, of Midnight Cowboy fame), through a close reading of their correspondence from 1915 to 1945. In a fluid, novelistic narrative, Buruma not only captures a remarkable marriage, but also a particular segment of English society-assimilated, upper-middle-class Jews. He shows his grandparents as "outsiders who were insiders too," whose enthusiastic embrace of English culture, if seemingly excessive at times, reflected gratitude that England, unlike their parents' birthplace of Germany, didn't betray its Jewish citizens. The excerpted letters depict Bernard and Win during their first courtship, interrupted by his service in France in WWI; during her days at Cambridge and his at Oxford; and during their later separation during WWII, when Win saw how life carried on as usual in London even as England's fate "was being decided in the skies," and Bernard, an Army doctor, witnessed the Empire's waning days in India. Buruma depicts his grandparents "with all their doubts and contradictions" as well as their "generosity of spirit," which extended to their rescue of 12 Jewish children from Nazi Germany-and hosting two German POWs for Christmas in 1946. This illuminating story of cultural assimilation and identity will resonate with many readers. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The war in the subtitle includes both WWI and WWII, during which the acclaimed author's grandparents, wealthy Jewish immigrants from Germany, were respectively in England (grandmother Winifred) or mostly fighting in the war or serving as a physician elsewhere in the world, primarily India (grandfather Bernard Bun Schlesinger). The love that Winnifred and Bun shared was a strong and singular one. Thus, the book is a fascinating and memorable personal family story. Buruma has touched on these themes before: Year Zero: A History of 1945 recounted his father's experience as a prisoner of the Nazis. Just when the narrative is in danger of slipping into very proper British sentimentality, we are told of Win and Bun saving (before Kristallnacht) a dozen children from the Nazis. The outsider role of Jews even in postwar Britain (Buruma's family uses the code word 45 to refer to them) is central to this stirring memoir.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE WIDOW, by Fiona Barton. (Berkley, $16.) After her husband dies in a gruesome accident, Jean, this debut novel's namesake widow, is thrust again into the spotlight. Her husband had been a chief suspect in a missing child case that captivated the country, and his death has renewed interest in the crime. With some reporters suspecting Jean knows more than she has let on, she seems poised to reveal her story. THEIR PROMISED LAND: My Grandparents in Lnve and War, by Ian Buruma. (Penguin, $17.) Drawing on thousands of his grandparents' letters, Buruma sketches the story of their marriage, which spanned World War I and II - and the turbulent era in which they lived. His is a "wholly understanding, moving account of what it meant to be Jewish and English in one of the most troubled times of the last century," our reviewer, Nick Fraser, said. CARRY ME, by Peter Behrens. (Anchor, $17.) The troubled times framed by war are also the backdrop for Behrens's novel, which tells the story of Billy Lange and Karin, the GermanJewish woman he loves. Growing up in England and Ireland during World War I, Billy saw his father, a German, interned, and felt the deep isolation that accompanies discrimination; later, living in 1930s Frankfurt, he dreams of escaping with Karin to America, whose allure is a bright spot amid Hitler's rise to power. IN EUROPE'S SHADOW: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond, by Robert D. Kaplan. (Random House, $18.) Kaplan first visited Romania more than three decades ago as a young journalist, reporting on the horrors under its repressive government. Drawing on his reporting from later trips, he traces Romania's shift away from Communism, and attempts to untangle the country's myriad influences, from Orthodox Christianity to contemporary Russia. CAST OF CHARACTERS: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker, by Thomas Vinciguerra. (Norton, $18.95.) In this ensemble biography, Vinciguerra chronicles the early years of the magazine, roughly spanning the Jazz Age through the end of World War II, with a focus on how many of its editorial stars shaped the The New Yorker's legacy for decades to come. GIRL THROUGH GLASS, by Sari Wilson. (Flarper Perennial, $15.99.) The choreographer George Balanchine's long shadow is evident in the stories of 11-year-old Mira, a ballet student in 1977, and Kate, a present-day dance historian. As our reviewer, Namara Smith, put it, the novel is less about ballet "than the costs of early virtuosity - the feeling of being propelled by a force you don't understand and can't control."
Guardian Review
Buruma's grandparents were Jews with family roots in Germany, but considered Britain, where they grew up, the best country in the world -- despite encountering its antisemitism As a boy in the late 1950s, Ian Buruma must have been puzzled when he heard his grandparents using the term "forty-five". Even now he is puzzled about its origins. It had nothing to do with P45s, or Colt 45s, or Rule 45 (the segregation of child offenders in prison), or 45rpm vinyl singles or the year the war ended, 1945. It was the code name for Jewish. "Is he [or she] forty-five?' his grandparents would ask whenever someone in the family made a new acquaintance. Bernard and Winnie Schlesinger were Jewish themselves, the children of stockbrokers, raised in the same affluent Hampstead milieu and brought together in their teens by a love of classical music. Their family roots were German (their grandfathers had been classmates in Frankfurt) but both were passionate about England: it, rather than Israel, was "their promised land". To young Ian, coming over from Holland to spend holidays with them, the life they had created, in an old vicarage in Berkshire, was a pastoral idyll: within their charmed circle, he too became an Anglophile, besotted by cricket, Eagle and Beano, blue blazers and Viyella shirts. Bernard and Winnie were a classic case of assimilation: shedding the marks of ethnic difference and immigrant status, they became more English than the English. It wasn't that they were self-hating Jews. Nor did they conceal their origins. When her elder brother Walter changed his name from Regensburg to Raeburn, Winnie (unmarried at the time) refused to follow suit. Later, when her son John -- one of five children -- was being bullied at boarding school, there were thoughts of losing the "ch": would he have an easier time of it as a Slesinger or Slazenger? But Bernard and Winnie stood firm. And though at times they despaired of John as "spineless" and "a pansy", his surname didn't hold him back: he went on to a prestigious film career, as the director of movies such as Billy Liar, Midnight Cowboy and Sunday Bloody Sunday. Bernard, too, made a success of life, as a doctor, though it wasn't without its obstacles. It took him years to get a position at Great Ormond Street hospital, despite his obvious abilities, and he was later denied one at St Thomas's: "45 -- the old, old story," he wrote. But he remained upbeat about England as a fair and decent society, despite antisemitism being the norm. It just didn't do to be too "Coheny" (his phrase) if you wanted to get on. Fond though he was of his ageing grandparents, Buruma would have known little about their early lives but for the letters they wrote to each other during a courtship punctuated by the first world war and a marriage punctuated by the second -- letters spanning over half a century that they couldn't bear to throw away and that he read after their deaths. From this huge cache, he has "contrived to produce a kind of novel in letters, with myself as a kind of Greek chorus" -- an act of homage that also has a fascinating story to tell. It was a violin recital she gave at his cousin's house that prompted Bernard's first letter to Winnie, sent from his home in Fitzjohn's Avenue (FitzJew's as some called it) and keen to impress on her his appreciation of Beethoven and Brahms. He was still a schoolboy at the time, head of house and in the first XV for rugby at Uppingham, but due to take his Cambridge entrance exams and, more to the point, eager to get to France and do his bit: it was the spring of 1915 and Bernard was no less patriotic, or naive, than any other young Englishman. The letters Winnie wrote in reply were less lyrical than Bernard's but romance was blooming on both sides. Then suddenly, before going to the front, he broke it off, in embarrassingly cutesy metaphors about mice and squirrels that only half disguised the reason -- his parents had told him he was too young to be "serious" about someone. It was several years before their relationship resumed but in the meantime he wrote to Winnie's family from the trenches. "It is some life out here I can tell you & certainly an experience not to be missed," he reported, downplaying the horrors of his job as a stretcher-bearer -- whether from chivalry, trauma or fear of the censor, he spared them any detail about corpses. Exhausted and covered in boils, he was shipped back in October 1918, fetching up in the same ward of the military hospital where Winnie was nursing -- a coincidence that must have seemed like fate. They announced their engagement in 1922 but it was another three years before they married. Bernard, at Cambridge, encouraged Winnie to go to Oxford, which eventually, after much resistance, she did (she liked to portray herself as a golf-and-horses sort of woman, lacking the brains of her highbrow German cousins). Their grandson thinks they were virgins when they married, quoting from one letter in which Bernard apologises to Winnie for almost "going too far" and another, from 1943, in which he recalls visiting Pompeii (with its erotic frescoes) on their honeymoon: "And to think we had to get inspiration of ways and means from Pompeii. I am afraid you married rather a greenhorn." The interwar years, which Bernard and Winnie mostly spent together, are short on letters, naturally enough. But there are sporadic mentions of their growing unease at what was happening in Germany. And in 1938, they took decisive action, arranging for 12 Jewish children "specially chosen from the professional classes" to come to England, setting up a hostel in Highgate where they could be placed, and busying themselves with their comfort and welfare. Most of the duties involved, both with these children and her own, fell to Winnie, since Bernard was soon away as a forces medic, first in Norway and later in India. The letters they exchanged during the second world war are full of fascinating asides: Bernard's experiences of empire, Winnie's failure to be accepted as a volunteer for the Red Cross ("One never seems to live down one's parents' foreign extraction"), their views on Churchill, communism, the Nazis ("what fiendish bastards"), homosexuality, religion. As the years pass, Winnie becomes increasingly conservative but liberalism and generosity prevail -- as exemplified in 1946 when, despite all the relations they had lost in the Holocaust, they invited two German soldiers from a POW camp to spend Christmas with them. As Greek chorus, Buruma makes few appearances in the narrative, but there is one hilarious story when, at the age of five, he is taken by Winnie to visit a neighbour of hers, whose husband, Colonel James, has just died. Sworn to make no mention of it, young Ian behaves impeccably during tea and cakes -- until, with Mrs James waving them off, he sticks his head out the car window and shouts, "Colonel James is dead! Colonel James is dead!" Winnie wasn't just embarrassed but mortified -- to an extent that shows how socially insecure she remained, despite her seemingly triumphant assimilation as (in her words) "an English woman, privileged to live in and for the most wonderful country in the world". The complexities of class, race and nationhood are subtly teased out by her grandson, who hopes that she and Bernard "would have forgiven me for making [their letters] public". I think they would. * To order Their Promised Land for [pound]15.19 ([pound]18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Blake Morrison.
Kirkus Review
A prizewinning historian recounts his German-Jewish family's time in England during the most turbulent years of the 20th century. A treasure trove of love letters, produced over five decades and discovered locked in steel boxes in a barn, provided the raw materials from which Buruma (Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism/Bard Coll.; Year Zero: A History of 1945, 2014, etc.) has shaped the fascinating story of his grandparents Bernard and Win Schlesinger. Both were children of German Jews who had immigrated to Britain in the 19th century and prospered. So, too, did their children, who, for the author, represent "the old immigrant story" of advancing through "higher education and prosperity." Buruma, however, probes the tensions below the surface of the family's apparent success. Never distant from their family connections in Germany, they were also targets of anti-Semitism in England. Both Bernard and Win served in World War I; Win was a nurse, and Bernard was a stretcher-bearer on the Western front. However, anti-Semitism ultimately stymied Bernard's career as a doctor. "The senior job is not for me at any price," he wrote in 1938 after rejection by St. Thomas's Hospital. Before the horrors of Kristallnacht, Win and Bernard had begun to set up a hostel where they sheltered rescued Jewish children. Raised by their parents as normal Germans, most had no idea why they were singled out for persecution. The family also found time to raise a family of five, which included future award-winning movie director John Schlesinger. During World War II, Bernard wrote daily from India, even knowing delivery was months away at best. On May 8th, 1945, he wrote, "my Belovedon this historic day I must send you a word of loveperhaps now after this war people will finally work out their salvation." Buruma impressively captures his grandparents' remarkable lives in this insightful narrative. The author shapes his family's labor of a lifetime into a scintillating work of art. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
While novelist and scholar Buruma (human rights, Bard Coll.; Year Zero) is no stranger to studies of early and mid-20th-century history, this work hits a bit closer to home for him. In it, he details the relationship of his grandparents-both English Jews with German heritage-through letters and photographs, from the time they met just before World War I until the end of World War II. Buruma gives the missives depth and context by conveying events of the time, as well as sociocultural concerns of those of Jewish faith who longed to be accepted in English society and had to decide how to assimilate. The correspondence reveals a beautiful and complex love story that lasted through triumphs and disasters, years of separation, anti-Semitic microaggressions, and social and family pressures. VERDICT Buruma's work is well-paced, absorbing, and gives a human face to some of the darkest eras of contemporary European history. Readers interested in biography, Judaism, social history, European history, the history of both World Wars, and/or a good old-fashioned love story will find much here to appreciate. [See Prepub Alert, 7/13/15.]-Crystal -Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Don't like the Name | p. 1 |
1 First Love | p. 23 |
2 Going to War | p. 51 |
3 The Long Wait | p. 77 |
4 Safe Haven | p. 115 |
5 The Beginning | p. 153 |
6 The End of the Beginning | p. 183 |
7 Empire | p. 209 |
8 The Beginning of the End | p. 243 |
9 The End | p. 267 |
Epitaph | p. 287 |
Acknowledgments | p. 293 |
Index | p. 295 |