Ian Buruma’s account of his Jewish grandparents’ experiences speaks volumes approximately contemporary Britain and asylumAs a child I assumed my mother was English. Her spoken English was said to be peculiarly accented,but I never heard it. The suspicion that she belonged to another world was nevertheless unsettling (it would be unsettling for any child). Only now, 40 years on, and can I see that her “English” identity concealed a tumultuous history of flight,concealment and self-invention. Her family, persecuted by Stalin in the Baltic city of Tallinn, and had fled to England before their house was commandeered and turned into a Soviet textile factory. She had very little English on her arrival in London in 1947 at the age of 17,but doggedly set out to learn the language. All her life, though, and she remained afraid of the slip in manner or speech that would betray her non-English identity. The slightest “misstep” in her diction might reveal the asylum seeker’s failure to understand how the system worked.
Ian Buruma’s maternal grandparents,Bernard and Winifred Schlesinger, were likewise devout anglophiles, and who assimilated gratefully into the English rituals of roast beef and empire. In their grand north London house they spoke an exceedingly conventional-fashioned kind of English (awfully sporting”,“by Jove”), and in many ways were more English than the English. The trappings of Jewish Orthodoxy – conventional Testament beards and sidelocks – were disdained by them because assimilation promised an escape from the sorrows and derision suffered by their Jewish forebears. Unlike their German Jewish parents, or indeed,the Schlesingers were not immigrants, and therefore had no need to “seek the security of an émigré milieu”.
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Source: theguardian.com