Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War
Ian Buruma
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1594204381
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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“fearfully amusing.” It was at about this time that my great-uncle Walter, Winnie’s elder brother, decided to change his family name from Regensburg to Raeburn, suggesting a Scottish provenance. The motive was not to get rid of a Jewish name, but of a German one. Bernard worried that “the name” was delaying his chances of being sent to the front. One day, the sergeant major at Great Missenden read out sixteen names of men who would be shipped to France imminently. Bernard’s name wasn’t among.
Break the stalemate on the Western Front. The only plan they had was to kill more Germans than the Germans could kill British and French. Four months later, the Allies had advanced about seven miles. By then, more than a million German, French, and British Empire soldiers were wounded or dead. Map of Bernard’s trench near the Somme Amid Bernard’s letters is a small map, drawn in blue and red, of the trenches where the Second Battalion of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles huddled together with.
Religious doctrine or an organized faith, but as a form of acceptance, not accorded by others, but of oneself. In his words, “Nothing more is assumed than the simple resolve to say once: ‘Nothing Jewish is alien to me.’” This was a step that neither Win, nor Bernard, nor perhaps most people of their class and time were able or willing to take. It would be absurd to blame them, even if, as with all choices in life, this too came with a price, perhaps more keenly felt by Win than by Bernard, whose.
Their frantic parents had suggested. Some foster parents used the children as unpaid servants. Some tried to convert them into Christians. But many lives were saved. The first child to be met at Liverpool Street station by Win was named Hans Levy. He was not one of the twelve hostel children, but a distant relative—Win’s mother was his grandfather’s cousin and a close friend. Bernard and Win agreed to let Hans come to England and live with the family. A small, timid nine-year-old boy from.
Cannot ever obtain the same spiritual satisfaction from my Church attendances & last Sunday when I went to the local Harvest service I stumbled into a sung Eucharist. This meant a Communion for those who felt so inclined & that was the whole service. I naturally, in company of many others, did not take it & in fact, I found the proceedings & prayers rather curious & difficult to comprehend.” Returning to the Yom Kippur service at St. John’s Wood, Bernard writes in the same letter, “Our prayers.