Buruma’s grandparents were Jews with family roots in Germany, but considered Britain, where they grew up, the best country in the world – despite encountering its antisemitism
As a boy in the late 1950s, Ian Buruma must have been puzzled when he heard his grandparents using the term “forty-five”. Even now he is puzzled about its origins. It had nothing to do with P45s, or Colt 45s, or Rule 45 (the segregation of child offenders in prison), or 45rpm vinyl singles or the year the war ended, 1945. It was the code name for Jewish. “Is he [or she] forty-five?’ his grandparents would ask whenever someone in the family made a new acquaintance.
Bernard and Winnie Schlesinger were Jewish themselves, the children of stockbrokers, raised in the same affluent Hampstead milieu and brought together in their teens by a love of classical music. Their family roots were German (their grandfathers had been classmates in Frankfurt) but both were passionate about England: it, rather than Israel, was “their promised land”. To young Ian, coming over from Holland to spend holidays with them, the life they had created, in an old vicarage in Berkshire, was a pastoral idyll: within their charmed circle, he too became an Anglophile, besotted by cricket, Eagle and Beano, blue blazers and Viyella shirts.
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