Mr Rosenblum’s List
Jack Rosenblum is five foot three and a half inches of sheer tenacity and through study and application he intends to become a Very English Gentleman.
Jack is compiling a list: a comprehensive guide to the manners, customs and habits of England. He knows that marmalade must be bought from Fortnum & Mason, he’s memorised every British monarch back to 913 A.D. and the highlight of his day is the BBC weather forecast. And he never speaks German, apart from the occasional curse.
From the moment he disembarked at Harwich in 1937 he understood that assimilation was the key. But the war’s been over for eight years and despite his best efforts, his bid to blend in remains fraught with unexpected hurdles. Including his wife.
Sadie finds his obsession baffling. She doesn’t want to forget who they are or where they came from. She’d rather bake cakes to remember the people they left behind than worry about how to play tennis.
But Jack is convinced they can find a place to call home. In a final attempt to complete his list, he leads a reluctant Sadie deep into the English countryside. Here, in a land of woolly pigs, bluebells and jitterbug cider, they embark on an impossible task….
Foreign Covers
Hello Natasha,
I just read your book, and it is amazing. The ending was sad but I was glad they finally had a place to call ‘home’. I am doing Media Studies for my degree and your book is one of our core texts. We have to relate multiculturalism, feminism, and signs to your story. I don’t know why, but it took me some time to understand the story, maybe because I was looking at your story in depth for my analysis.
Dear Ms. Solomons:
I just finished “Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English” and was very moved, because of the similarities with my own family.
I myself was a real life child of people like Jack and Sadie, who were Ray and Jadwiga. Ray was the American son of Polish immigrant steelworkers and Jadwiga, my mother, was a Polish Catholic from Bialystok, deported by the Russians at the beginning of the war to a Siberian work camp when she was 17. They took her mother to a different camp. When Germany attacked Russia, she was liberated and sent to the Middle East were she joined a faction of the Polish army and later met my father, an American, at the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. Many members of my mother’s family died during the war.
She came to America as a bride but never really adapted. We children were raised in the old European way by her and the images of Sadie baking late into the night to quell her sorrows was very moving to me as my mother also had an old cook book with memories. She told me stories of prewar Europe and the food her aunt made and how beautiful Poland was before it was destroyed. Because of her East European ethnicity and heavy accent, myself and my three siblings always felt different than other typical American children. Today, I still feel the difference.
And just like Jack, my parents also changed their Polish surname in the 1950s to Americanize. Therefore, like Sadie, I feel that my heritage was lost in the post war craze to fit in. I am not related to anyone else who shares my adoptive last name.
Thank you so much for writing this book: my parents are both gone now (they would be in their 90s) and this book reminded me so much of them.
Dear Natasha,
I am not often moved to write to an author but I have jus finished your charming book Mr Rosenblum’s List. It is an amazing story of triumph over adversity and the art of visualising and trying to fulfill a dream. I groaned at every setback but the characters are so beautifully drawn that I knew all would be well. Your descriptions of the countryside are wonderful. I particularly loved his doggedness about writing to Mr Jones with the encouragement of his friend Curtis. Thank you so much.