Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War

Description

Ian Buruma's grandparents, Bernard Schlesinger and Winifred Regensburg (Winnie & Bun), wrote to each other regularly over their sixty years together. The first letters were written in 1915, when Bernard was still at school at Uppingham and Win was taking music lessons in Hampstead. The last ones were written in the 1970s. Most of them are love letters, written from the trenches in France in World War One, from Oxford and Cambridge in the 1920s, from Germany in the 1930s, from Norway and India in World War Two. Often, especially when Bernard was away for three years in India as a doctor in the British Army, they wrote every day, knowing it would take weeks, and sometimes months to reach the other side. Their letters are a priceless record of an assimilated Jewish family living in England throughout the upheavals of the twentieth century and a moving portrait of a loving couple separated by war. By using their own words, Ian Buruma tells their story and embarks on a personal journey that reveals his own family history.

Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan. He has spent many years in Asia, which he has written about in A Japanese Mirror and Bad Elements. His other books include: The Wages of Guilt, Anglomania and Year Zero. Buruma lives in New York, where he teaches at Bard College. He writes frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and many other publications in the US and Europe.

A fascinating story... The complexities of class, race and nationhood are subtly teased out -- Blake Morrison * Guardian * From his grandparents' past, Buruma has assembled a fascinating chronicle of modern Britain. -- Ian Thomson * Observer * A gentle and intimate study of identity and love... It is to Buruma's credit that so much has been laid bare... This is rich material that still resonates today. On matters of identity, on the public and private, the more things change, the more they stay the same. -- Philippe Sands * Financial Times * This artful volume reveals a good deal about the world we live in today... Exceptional * Spectator * 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 * 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... A fascinating, subtle, wonderfully readable book. * Eva Hoffman * 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... At once family memoir and history, this is a book to linger over and savour. * Lisa Appignanesi * 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. * The Economist * 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 * 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 * 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) * Ian Buruma's moving love letter to his grandparents' memory is evocative and absorbing... The memory these good people left behind is lovingly recorded in this volume. It left me tearful with nostalgia for the world of the Schlesingers and my grandparents -- Julia Neuberger * Jewish Chronicle * A wonderful book -- Ian Jack * The Oldie *