Buruma doesn’t judge his grandparents. Instead, drawing from their letters, he has given us 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.
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.
Buruma ends his book with a visit to the modest graves of Win, Bernard and John Schlesinger in the United Synagogue Cemetery in Willesden, now an ethnically diverse area of northwest London. He does not expect the reader of their letters to love Bernard and Win, as he did, but he hopes to have honored their memories. Perhaps he has.
...an intimate, rambling, charming, and ultimately moving memoir — and social history — about the competing pulls of romantic love, family, country, and religious heritage.
Buruma’s book is all about identity. On the surface it appears rather indulgent: a lyrical ode to family by a cosmopolitan intellectual, which has little to say to the rest of us. But below the narrative is an imaginative study about belonging, and where people choose to locate their loyalties, and how they navigate between them.
Their Promised Land seems awkwardly caught between fiction and memoir, with neither the imaginative sweep of the former nor the heft of the latter. Instead, what we have is certainly more elaborate than those boxes of old letters but ultimately not much more moving.
Buruma spends more time on the war part of his subtitle than the love, but the glimpses of tenderness are among the book's most moving passages. 'I shall be thinking of you all the time with the most loving wishes,' Win wrote to Bernard at the start of World War II. Think about each other they did, for almost 60 years, in a remarkable romance that their grandson has commemorated with this beautiful book.
The book, an affecting portrait told through the grandparents’ many letters, turns a historian’s eye on wartime antisemitism and its consequences ... From his grandparents’ jigsaw-puzzle past, Buruma has assembled a fascinating chronicle of love, assimilation and immigration in modern Britain.
