Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War

Ian Buruma

ISBN 10: 1504642120 ISBN 13: 9781504642125

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc., 2016

Synopsis

[*Read by the author - Ian Buruma]

A family history of surpassing beauty and power, Their Promised Land is 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, 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 the 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 their remarkable marriage, 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 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.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan. He has spent many years in Asia, which he has written about in God's Dust, A Japanese Mirror and Behind the Mask. His other books include: Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, Anglomania and Year Zero. Buruma is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for the Humanities in Washington, DC. He writes frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and the Financial Times.

Review

''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.'' -- Publisher's 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)

''A fascinating and memorable personal family story...[A] stirring memoir'' --Booklist 

''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

''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

''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 Starred Review 

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

''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 savour.'' --Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion and All About Love

About this edition

• Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1504642120
• ISBN 13: 9781504642125
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 1