I picked this book up off a dollar store shelf, taken by the title. I taught ESL and among language teachers it’s commonplace to say that a student is starting to make real progress when s/he begins dreaming in the target language. It turned out that the book didn’t concern language acquisition at all, but was about cultural adaptation, specifically the ardent desire of Mr. Rosenblum to fit in his adopted country of England.

It’s the story of an immigrant Jewish couple that flees Germany at the onset of WWII and ends up first in London and then in the hinterland of Dorset. This is no hard-hitting saga about wartime atrocities or the tragic plight of refugees but a light and fanciful story that mostly plays on the blurred edges of reality in an atmosphere as menacing as one created by P. G. Wodehouse. Mr. Rosenblum’s eccentric attempts to become a real Englishman lead to his quixotic venture of building a world-class golf course in the middle of nowhere with his bare hands, after his efforts to join a club are rebuffed because of antisemitism. There are plenty of struggles and catastrophes in the course of the book, but they elicit smiles rather than sighs because the world in which they take place is not quite the real world. The main charm of the book, in fact, is how it touches on nasty and messy matters like war, displacement, bigotry, marital discord and the orneriness of human beings without losing its innocence.

I found the book to be a quick, light and enjoyable read. I liked it well enough to pass on to my sister who, I felt, might especially enjoy it for the Yiddish words and scenes dealing with gardening and baking.