Their Promised Land Read online

  Praise for Their Promised Land

  “Their Promised Land is a carefully and admirably written, highly readable work of social history told charmingly in a most intimate way through a close perusal of family correspondence. Buruma writes of British-born Jews of the upper-middle class with a great, sympathetic perspicacity and sweetness—these are after all his grandparents who are his subject—and, most revealingly, he traces with precision the effect on their lives of being Jews of German origin in their beloved England during the two world wars.”

  —Philip Roth

  “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 . . . Buruma’s voyage into the past is a warning as well as a celebration of lost lives. Somehow we must ensure that our societies allow outsiders to flourish, however they choose to do it.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Enchanting . . . An imaginative study about belonging, and where people choose to locate their loyalties, and how they navigate between them.”

  —The New Republic

  “The Schlesingers are important not only in their idiosyncrasy—which emerges wondrously through their own words—but also because they embodied a type of diasporic Jew so prevalent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and not unknown today. . . . [While] questions of class, culture, and nationality give the book its worth, there is something else that sustains Mr. Buruma’s interest even more: the mystery of a passionate marriage that, at least in the letters, never seems to cool over time.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “An intimate, rambling, charming, and ultimately moving memoir—and social history—about the competing pulls of romantic love, family, country, and religious heritage.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “If you’ve ever complained that your grandparents were dull, then you didn’t have grandparents like Bernard and Winifred Schlesinger. . . . [An] exceptional book.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “From his grandparents’ jigsaw-puzzle past, Buruma has assembled a fascinating chronicle of love, assimilation, and immigration in modern Britain. ‘The England admired throughout the world is the England that keeps open house,’ J. B. Priestley wrote in 1933. After the mass movement of Jewish and other immigrants to Britain following the Second World War, however, British history could no longer be viewed merely as a saga of warring Saxon tribes and Romans. We speak of Great Britain, after all, greater than the sum of its parts, diverse as they may be. Their Promised Land, superbly written, is the beginning of wisdom in these things.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “A distinguished historian, Mr. Buruma approaches his subject with the loving eye of a grandchild and an awareness of the larger forces that shaped their lives. His sensitive portrayal of the immigrant’s divided loyalties and divided identity is timely in light of Europe’s current struggle with colliding national, religious, and ethnic identities. While the Schlesingers’ story does not directly parallel today’s refugee crisis, it does shed light on the fault-lines that remain even in the most successful of cultural mergings.”

  —The Economist

  “One comes away from this small but powerful book with a deep fondness and respect for its two central characters—and for the incredible devotion they shared, not only with each other, but with an England that was both real and an extension of their own admirable idealism.”

  —The Washington Times

  “The history of assimilation is often obscured by misunderstanding—both ethical and philosophical. In Their Promised Land, Ian Buruma offers a searching, tender memorial of his grandparents’ marriage that is, at the same time, a clarifying study in the complicated pleasures and discontents of multiple identity.”

  —Adam Thirlwell

  “To find a dusty cache of historic letters is a writer’s dream. To discover that these letters not only span two world wars, but follow the trajectory of two lovers who become the loving grandparents of idyllic holidays spent in a grand house in the English countryside, is to strike literary gold. From these letters, Ian Buruma has woven an utterly engrossing story of cultivated, upper class German Jews who grew up in England and made its values their own. On the way, he probes anti-Semitism in all its guises and shifting social attitudes. At once family memoir and history, this is a book to linger over and savor.”

  —Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion and All About Love

  “Ian Buruma, the critic, is justly famous for his ferocious acuity. Ian Buruma, the grandson, brings that same clarity of observation to this exceptional memoir, but he also writes with an elegiac tenderness that may surprise—and will deeply move—both his fans, and those readers who have yet to discover his magisterial gifts.”

  —Judith Thurman

  “In this warmly affectionate, richly textured family chronicle, Ian Buruma draws on his own memories and a treasure trove of intimate letters to uncover a moving love story, and paint a vivid picture of a seemingly idyllic world darkened by unexpected shadows. Informed by Buruma’s long-standing concerns as historian and cultural critic, Their Promised Land is an unsentimental elegy for a vanished cosmopolitan epoch, and an homage to lives made extraordinary by fidelity to ordinary virtues. A fascinating, subtle, wonderfully readable book.”

  —Eva Hoffman

  “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. . . . This illuminating story of cultural assimilation and identity will resonate with many readers. . . . A moving, intimate portrait.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A beautiful and complex love story that lasted through triumphs and disasters, years of separation, anti-Semitic microaggressions, and social and family pressures. 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.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “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.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THEIR PROMISED LAND

  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.

  ALSO BY IAN BURUMA

  Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War

  Year Zero: A History of 1945

  Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents

  The China Lover: A Novel

  Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance

  Conversations with John Schlesinger

  Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

  Inventing Japan: 1853–1964

  Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing

  The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan

  Anglomania: A European Love Affair

  The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West

  Playing the Game

  Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters and Other J
apanese Cultural Heroes

  The Japanese Tattoo (text by Donald Richie, photographs by Ian Buruma)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

  Published in Penguin Books 2017

  Copyright © 2016 by Ian Buruma

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Photographs courtesy of the author

  Ebook ISBN 9780698410183

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Names: Buruma, Ian.

  Title: Their promised land : my grandparents in love and war / Ian Buruma.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2016. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015043408 | ISBN 9781594204388 (hc.) | ISBN 9780143109952 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Schlesinger, Bernard, 1896-1984—Correspondence. |

  Schlesinger, Winifred, 1897-1986--Correspondence. |

  Jews—England—London—Biography. | Jews,

  German—England—London—Biography. | Jews, German—Cultural

  assimilation—England—London. | Spouses—England—London—Biography. |

  World War, 1914–1918—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Biography. |

  Love-letters—England—London. | Buruma, Ian. | BISAC: HISTORY / Jewish. |

  HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical.

  Classification: LCC DS135.E6 A1176 2016 | DDC 305.892/404210922—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043408

  Cover design and hand-lettering: Samantha Russo

  Cover photographs: Courtesy of the author

  Version_2

  For Isabel and Josephine

  CONTENTS

  Praise for THEIR PROMISED LAND

  About the Author

  Also by Ian Buruma

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  DON’T LIKE THE NAME

  One

  FIRST LOVE

  Two

  GOING TO WAR

  Three

  THE LONG WAIT

  Four

  SAFE HAVEN

  Five

  THE BEGINNING

  Six

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  Seven

  EMPIRE

  Eight

  THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  Nine

  THE END

  Epitaph

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  DON’T LIKE THE NAME

  Asked whether he believed in happy marriage, Philip Roth replied: “Yes, and some people play the violin like Isaac Stern. But it’s rare.”

  —Claudia Roth Pierpont,

  Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

  When I think of my maternal grandparents, I think of Christmas. Since they both lived into the 1980s, I can think of many other things too. But Christmas at St. Mary Woodlands House, the large vicarage in Berkshire where they lived next to Woodlands St. Mary’s, a mid-Victorian Gothic church, now no longer in use, will always be my childhood idyll.

  Age in these memories is rather indistinct. Anything between six and fourteen, I suppose. Roughly between 1958 and 1966. Between grey Marks and Spencer shorts and my powder-blue Beatles hat.

  Nothing could ever match the thrill of arriving late at night, exhausted and a little sick from spending much of the day in our family car thick with my mother’s cigarette smoke, having started early that morning in The Hague, crossing the choppy North Sea on a Belgian ferryboat smelling of petrol fumes and vomit (the British Rhine Army going home), waiting for hours in the customs shed at Dover, crawling endlessly along one-lane country roads, taking in the familiar English winter odors of soot and bonfire smoke, and then finally pulling into the graveled drive of St. Mary Woodlands, to be greeted with the jovial laughter of my grandfather, “Grandpop,” wearing a green tweed jacket and smoking a pipe.

  The two-story house with its large windows and elephant-grey stucco walls was not grand, even though my memory has greatly expanded its size as though it were one of the great English country houses. It was not. But it was spacious. And it gave off a sense of solid Victorian comfort. A lawn, about the size of two football fields, at the rear of the house, flanked by broad flowerbeds tended by my grandmother, backed into a line of high oak trees, home to hundreds of cawing rooks, looking out to what is now the M4 motorway.

  The lawn was used in summer for games of croquet and village fetes. Ladies in hats inspected the wooden tables laden with prize fruits, vegetables, and homemade cakes. There were coconut shies, a tombola, and lucky dips. The vicar of St. Mary’s mingled with surgeons, retired colonels, assorted family members, and the odd local aristocrat, such as Lady S., who was cheerfully drunk before lunch, and usually accompanied by a formidable lady in tweeds, known to us as “Major C.” Sherry was served on the terrace. High tea came with cakes, scones, chocolate biscuits, and cucumber sandwiches. These domestic scenes were always bathed in sunshine, of course, followed by the long shadows and golden light of early summer evenings.

  Christmas at St. Mary Woodlands, my sister and me

  Just so, in my mind’s eye, the lawn never failed to be buried under a thick blanket of snow at Christmas.

  After piling out of my father’s car, we would enter the house through the kitchen, where Laura, the beloved family cook, hovered over the stove, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth on the verge of dripping ash onto a freshly roasted lamb.

  There were other “char ladies” who loom large in my childhood memories, such as the toothless Mrs. Tuttle, the pale and birdlike Mrs. Dobson, and an enormously stout lady with a neighing laugh, named Mrs. Mackerell, with whose husband, “Old Butt,” my grandfather would repair once a year to a local pub for his Christmas drink.

  To the side of the kitchen was Laura’s room, a dark, messy space with a strong whiff of sweat, dog, and unwashed stockings. This was where the only television set in the house was installed. TV was not really approved of by my grandparents, hence perhaps its banishment to the house’s least salubrious corner. I spent many happy hours there, alone or sometimes with Laura, watching English comedy shows in black and white (Frankie Howerd and Sidney James) and American westerns (The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke). No one else watched television much. An exception was made when a member of the family was on the TV. My aunt Susan played Samuel Pepys’s wife in a series based on his diaries; my uncle John, before becoming a famous film director, made documentaries for the BBC about fine English cheeses, World War II generals, art school students, and Georges Simenon speaking about his sexual conquests through a haze of tobacco smoke. John also had a brief career as an actor. I remember seeing him in Laura’s room as a minstrel pretending to play the mandolin while singing a song to Roger Moore in an episode of Ivanhoe.

  My grandmother and me in 1953

  A narrow passage led from the kitchen to the main hall, where a wide and elegant staircase climbed to the bedrooms on the first floor. From early December onward the walls along the stairs were covered up to the ceiling in Christmas cards, hundreds and hundreds of them, like leaves of ivy on a garden wall. Making sure to send Christmas cards to everyone she knew, or who might possibly be offended if they didn’t
get one, was an annual source of neurotic obsession for my grandmother, or “Granny,” who would be mortified to receive a card from anyone she might possibly have overlooked.

  It was not just the Christmas cards that spoke of a certain air of excess. Everything about Christmas seemed a trifle overdone, certainly more lavish than anything we were used to at home in Holland—the mistletoe, the ubiquitous holly, the candles, and especially, in the large drawing room looking out onto the garden, the Christmas tree, whose opulence, like so much else, might be slightly magnified by memory, but not much. Dripping with gold and silver baubles, festooned with streams of glittery trimmings, angels dangling from pretty little candlesticks, the tree was topped by a shining angel stretching her arms all the way to the high ceiling. This totem of pagan abundance, looking over a small mountain range of beautifully wrapped presents at its base, was not really vulgar—Granny had excellent taste. It was just very, very big.

  The impression was clear: here was a family that was serious about Christmas.

  Christmas Day, for my two sisters and me, began as early as four or five o’clock in the morning, when we could no longer contain ourselves and would fall upon the Christmas stockings, seemingly made for giants, bulging with nuts, chocolates, fruits, and a panoply of presents. Gifts that were too bulky to be stuffed into these huge cotton sausages were tied to them with string: an illustrated edition of Kipling’s Jungle Book, a much-wished-for toy Colt revolver, a set of paints and brushes, a plastic model of a Lancaster bomber, and much more that I have forgotten. Family friends who stayed as guests and received equally bountiful stockings assumed that this was the extent of the Christmas presents, slightly baffled why this seasonal ritual was dealt with so early in the day. Little did they know.

  After a cup of tea and biscuits taken in bed, a cooked breakfast was waiting for us on warm silver domed platters laid out on the mahogany sideboard in the downstairs dining room. There were sausages and tomatoes, deviled kidneys, plump brown kippers glistening in butter, scrambled, poached, or boiled eggs freshly hatched in the chicken coop next to the gardener’s cottage, and various kinds of toast with an assortment of homemade jams. This was just the beginning of a daylong feast of Edwardian gluttony, interrupted only by a brisk walk in the morning on the snowy top of Inkpen Beacon, marked by an old wooden gibbet where murderers used to be hanged. Then came the opening of presents after lunch, and a languid hour or two after tea of listening to classical music records presented to one another by the adults.