Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English (2010) by Natasha Solomons is a book I pre-ordered back in February on the strength of a single review; I am pleased to report that I was not disappointed.
In the village of Pursebury Ash, in the summer of 1953, Jack Rose is building a golf course. The reasons are at once all tangled up and absurdly, devastatingly simple, but we'll start with the top layer—he cannot find a golf club which will admit him. He was Jakob Morris Rosenblum when he arrived in London with his wife and child in 1937, and while the intervening years have seen him transform from a stammering Berliner refugee to the successful owner of the largest carpet factory in the East End with a suit from Henry Poole and a daughter who reads English literature at Cambridge, they have not conferred their final, elusive privilege, that of being perfectly, naturally, unassailably English. It's not as though Jack hasn't studied how to do it. He keeps a list, expanded by his own observations from an old pamphlet by the German Jewish Aid Committee: An Englishman apologises even when something is not his fault. An Englishman drives a Jaguar. An Englishman keeps his head in a crisis no matter what. An Englishman listens to the BBC. Each item is crossed off as the years go by, like the ingredients of a spell. An Englishman studies The Times with careful attention. An Englishman must be a member of a golf club. But not an Englishman named Rosenblum, unless he wishes to belong to a Jewish-only golf club. Which Jack refuses to settle for; it would be just another reminder that he remains an outsider, no matter how carefully he follows the rules. So he purchases sixty acres in Dorsetshire and sets about reproducing, singlehandedly, in a landscape of hedgerows, hayfields, and more moles than he has ever seen before in his life, the Old Course at St Andrews.
Perhaps he liked golf because it had rules—within those little laws lay a logical order. If you played the game and obeyed the rules, then win or lose you were safe. The game contained and held you safely within its structures. For the hours of your round, you could live in this perfected world of flowers and silver pools, and exist according to the boundaries of the game. Golf was a great list of rules, all by itself.
The results are something like an Ealing comedy about assimilation. Jack's project is something only a bona fide, Singer-penned luftmensch could have come up with—or an Englishman in the finest traditions of national eccentricity. But it is to the book's credit that the more quixotic aspects of the plot never turn sticky, in part because while the title tells you about Jack, fully half the story belongs to Sadie Rosenblum, who does not share her husband's passion for all things English. For her, England has never been Heimat. She mourns her parents and her brother Emil, who never got out of Germany; she holds on to them through photographs into which her memories are beginning to fade, through the recipes she learned from her mother—the conventional ones like 'dishes so that you can tell it is summer', 'meals for times that are cold and wintry', but there were others like 'biscuits for when one is sad', or 'buns for heartbreak'—and the ritual calendar she no longer quite observes, though she will not yield its marking of the year to things like bank holidays. Her list is keeping faith with the dead. A less interesting novel would eventually put one of them in the wrong, or fail to keep them from reducing to arguments for/against old countries and new. Fortunately, Jack and Sadie's marriage is too thorny to be schematic; as are their feelings about their daughter, Elizabeth, with her English-rose complexion and her "dark Jewish hair," whom they have raised accidentally between two worlds. I suppose the novel's ending is not a surprise, but I was not expecting all of the places it went in the meantime or the stranger threads that began to weave into the narrative, like legends of woolly-pigs and Jack-in-the-Green and the local mondegreening of Jack and Sadie's name into Rose-in-Bloom. I am not sure about the epilogue, but I am rarely sure about epilogues. (It doesn't break the book.) I like that pieces of the story belong to the author's grandparents and I have no idea exactly which ones they are.
And I am sure someone will want to make a movie out of it, but mostly I recommend you read the book. It was published in the UK under the title Mr. Rosenblum's List, which possibly recalled Schindler too closely for American readers' comfort, I have no idea; it has a rather nice cover in both editions. I have probably made it sound too much like its jacket copy. It's a more thoughtful and a more subtle novel than its premise implies. I am not fixing anything until I've slept.
In the village of Pursebury Ash, in the summer of 1953, Jack Rose is building a golf course. The reasons are at once all tangled up and absurdly, devastatingly simple, but we'll start with the top layer—he cannot find a golf club which will admit him. He was Jakob Morris Rosenblum when he arrived in London with his wife and child in 1937, and while the intervening years have seen him transform from a stammering Berliner refugee to the successful owner of the largest carpet factory in the East End with a suit from Henry Poole and a daughter who reads English literature at Cambridge, they have not conferred their final, elusive privilege, that of being perfectly, naturally, unassailably English. It's not as though Jack hasn't studied how to do it. He keeps a list, expanded by his own observations from an old pamphlet by the German Jewish Aid Committee: An Englishman apologises even when something is not his fault. An Englishman drives a Jaguar. An Englishman keeps his head in a crisis no matter what. An Englishman listens to the BBC. Each item is crossed off as the years go by, like the ingredients of a spell. An Englishman studies The Times with careful attention. An Englishman must be a member of a golf club. But not an Englishman named Rosenblum, unless he wishes to belong to a Jewish-only golf club. Which Jack refuses to settle for; it would be just another reminder that he remains an outsider, no matter how carefully he follows the rules. So he purchases sixty acres in Dorsetshire and sets about reproducing, singlehandedly, in a landscape of hedgerows, hayfields, and more moles than he has ever seen before in his life, the Old Course at St Andrews.
Perhaps he liked golf because it had rules—within those little laws lay a logical order. If you played the game and obeyed the rules, then win or lose you were safe. The game contained and held you safely within its structures. For the hours of your round, you could live in this perfected world of flowers and silver pools, and exist according to the boundaries of the game. Golf was a great list of rules, all by itself.
The results are something like an Ealing comedy about assimilation. Jack's project is something only a bona fide, Singer-penned luftmensch could have come up with—or an Englishman in the finest traditions of national eccentricity. But it is to the book's credit that the more quixotic aspects of the plot never turn sticky, in part because while the title tells you about Jack, fully half the story belongs to Sadie Rosenblum, who does not share her husband's passion for all things English. For her, England has never been Heimat. She mourns her parents and her brother Emil, who never got out of Germany; she holds on to them through photographs into which her memories are beginning to fade, through the recipes she learned from her mother—the conventional ones like 'dishes so that you can tell it is summer', 'meals for times that are cold and wintry', but there were others like 'biscuits for when one is sad', or 'buns for heartbreak'—and the ritual calendar she no longer quite observes, though she will not yield its marking of the year to things like bank holidays. Her list is keeping faith with the dead. A less interesting novel would eventually put one of them in the wrong, or fail to keep them from reducing to arguments for/against old countries and new. Fortunately, Jack and Sadie's marriage is too thorny to be schematic; as are their feelings about their daughter, Elizabeth, with her English-rose complexion and her "dark Jewish hair," whom they have raised accidentally between two worlds. I suppose the novel's ending is not a surprise, but I was not expecting all of the places it went in the meantime or the stranger threads that began to weave into the narrative, like legends of woolly-pigs and Jack-in-the-Green and the local mondegreening of Jack and Sadie's name into Rose-in-Bloom. I am not sure about the epilogue, but I am rarely sure about epilogues. (It doesn't break the book.) I like that pieces of the story belong to the author's grandparents and I have no idea exactly which ones they are.
And I am sure someone will want to make a movie out of it, but mostly I recommend you read the book. It was published in the UK under the title Mr. Rosenblum's List, which possibly recalled Schindler too closely for American readers' comfort, I have no idea; it has a rather nice cover in both editions. I have probably made it sound too much like its jacket copy. It's a more thoughtful and a more subtle novel than its premise implies. I am not fixing anything until I've slept.
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