Strangers in their native land

Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly happy marriage, Their Promised Land by Ian Buruma has a deeper purpose. The cache of letters to and from Winifred (‘Win’) and Bernard (‘Bun’) Schlesinger is the pre-email, daily correspondence of two people who could not bear to be apart, yet were separated for years at a time by both world wars. Although his grandparents died in 1984 and 1986, this artful volume reveals a good deal about the world we live in today.

Born and brought up in posh Hampstead comfort, with plenty of servants, before moving to a spacious old vicarage in Berkshire, Win Regensburg and Bernard Schlesinger were ‘educated in the usual manner of the English upper-middle class: public school in his case, and Oxford and Cambridge,’ Buruma writes. ‘They were British and had the perfect right to insist on it, and yet their sense of belonging was never simply to be taken for granted.’

As you might guess from the names, they were Jews of German origin, but so assimilated that the high point of their year was their lavish Christmas celebration. They could have followed Win’s elder brother, Walter, who changed his name to Raeburn (and later exchanged his tepid Judaism for lukewarm Anglicanism); however, it was 1915, and as Buruma says, ‘the motive was not to get rid of a Jewish name, but of a German one.’

Was it the German-ness or the Jewish-ness of their names that prevented Bernard from obtaining the London teaching hospital appointments he merited, or from being sent to France after he enlisted; or Win, despite gaining her nursing certificate, from being accepted as a VAD in a Hampstead hospital? This sort of petty, but wounding discrimination carried on right through the second world war, when Bernard served with distinction, ending up in India.