Mr Rosenblum’s List
WRITTEN BY
NATASHA SOLOMONS
REVIEW BY
JANET HANCOCK
https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/mr-rosenblums-list/
All Jack
Rosenblum wants is to be English. He and his wife Sadie, and one-year-old
daughter, disembarked at Harwich from Nazi Germany in 1937. In London’s East
End he becomes wealthy through the manufacture of carpets, and lives according
to rules set out in a pamphlet given to all refugees – 1. Learn English and its
correct pronunciation – annotating and expanding the list with his own
observations, buying marmalade from Fortnum and Mason, and a bespoke suit from
Savile Row. Sadie is at a loss to understand Jack’s obsession, his reverence
for Winston Churchill – in spite of being interned during the war – John
Betjeman, and the BBC weather forecast. She tries to keep alive Jewish customs
and rituals from ‘before’, cherishing her mother’s recipe book, cooking soups,
casseroles and cakes that taste of home.
The last
item on Jack’s list of Englishness is membership of a golf club. When every
club around London turns him down, he relocates to rural Dorset in 1952 to
build his own golf course, determined the first game shall be played on the
morning of the Queen’s coronation the following year. It is this comic
adventure which informs the narrative of the author’s debut novel, inspired by
the experience of her grandparents, who settled in Dorset. The recipes are authentic
and she has a feel for the rhythms and legends of rural life, threatened by
so-called progress, evoking seasons and times of day in luminous prose. Other
passages, however, become weighed down with adjectives and adverbs. I did not
find the characters engaging, many of them thinly drawn, with the exception of
Curtis, the centenarian villager, for some while Jack’s only friend. The pathos
and the immigrant experience, the very real desire to belong, often get lost
amid comedy and bumpkin stereotypes.
Mr Rosenblum's List by Natasha Solomons
This debut novel offers a subtle portrait of the
dilemma of identity faced by immigrants to Britain
Edmund
Gordon
Sun 18 Apr
2010 00.06 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/18/mr-rosenblums-list-book-review
The
publicity people at Sceptre have decided to present this first novel as a
whimsical paean to Englishness: it is subtitled "Friendly Guidance for the
Aspiring Englishman" and the cover of the hardback edition is dominated by
a watercolourish picture of wildflowers, butterflies and a tweedy figure in
plus-fours, and a description of the book as "utterly charming". All
this creates a somewhat misleading impression. Although the narrative is not
altogether free from whimsical elements, they are of marginal importance to
what is, at heart, a subtle and moving examination of the dilemma faced by
immigrants to modern Britain.
The story
follows Jakob Rosenblum, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who arrives in
London determined to fit in. Presented with a leaflet entitled "While You
Are in England: Helpful Information", he resolves to follow its guidance
unswervingly: he gives up speaking German, even to his wife, Sadie, except
"at moments of extreme stress"; he refrains from criticising the
peculiarities of his adopted country and from expressing any political
opinions. But when he is arrested as a "class B enemy alien (possible
security risk)", he decides that he must still be doing something wrong.
As soon as
he is released, he makes his own list of English characteristics to emulate.
The list contains observations such as: "The British housewife makes a
purchase of haddock on Friday mornings" and rules such as: "Don't
gesture with your hands when talking." With its help, Jack, as Jacob has
by now restyled himself, begins to feel that he has lost the imprint of his
foreignness.
But when he
reaches the final item on his list – "An Englishman must be a member of a
golf club" – he finds that despite his careful mimicry of native
mannerisms and mores, no club will accept him. The casual antisemitism that
prevents Jack from ever feeling at home in Britain is convincingly drawn. As
one golf club president says in response to his offer of complimentary
carpeting: "They think they can buy their way in anywhere, don't
they?"
Sadie,
meanwhile, is less keen to relinquish her Jewish identity, and resents her
husband's eagerness to do so. She begins keeping a list of her own –
"Remember to keep the sabbath, remember to keep the dietary laws" –
and cooks exclusively from her mother's recipe book. But these observances only
heighten her sense of estrangement and she begins to feel increasingly
isolated.
Jack
finally decides to build his own golf course in the Dorset countryside and the
second half of the novel is dominated by his attempts to do this. It is a
curious project and its ultimate value, the narrative suggests, is more in its
conception than its execution. In The Knox Brothers, her group biography of her
eccentric father and uncles, Penelope Fitzgerald describes "the patient,
self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution" as
the "characteristically English" way to approach a problem. Even if
he never quite passes himself off as an English gentleman, Jack's devotion to
his "unique and solitary calling" implies a level of assimilation he
never knows he has achieved. In its attention to the ways immigrants can become
alienated from both their native and their adopted countries, Mr Rosenblum's
List has much more to it than the nostalgic vision of Englishness suggested by
its cover.
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