The ultimate goal of my family? To assimilate

The lawn was used in summer for games of croquet and village fêtes. Ladies in hats inspected the wooden tables laden with prize fruits, vegetables, and homemade cakes. There were coconut shies, a tombola, and lucky dips. The vicar of St Mary's mingled with surgeons, retired colonels, assorted family members, and the odd local aristocrat. Sherry was served on the terrace. High tea came with cakes, scones, chocolate biscuits, and cucumber sandwiches. These domestic scenes were always bathed in sunshine, of course.

Just as, in my mind's eye, the lawn never failed to be buried under a thick blanket of snow at Christmas.

From the main hall, a wide and elegant staircase climbed to the bedrooms on the first floor. From early December, the walls along the stairs were covered in Christmas cards, hundreds and hundreds of them, like leaves of ivy on a garden wall. Making sure to send Christmas cards to everyone she knew, or who might possibly be offended if they didn't get one, was an annual source of neurotic obsession for my grandmother, or "Granny," who would be mortified to receive a card from anyone she might possibly have overlooked.

It was not just the Christmas cards that spoke of a certain air of excess. Everything about Christmas seemed a trifle overdone, certainly more lavish than anything we were used to at home in Holland - the mistletoe, the ubiquitous holly, the candles, and especially, in the large drawing room looking out on to the garden, the Christmas tree, whose opulence, like so much else, might be slightly magnified by memory, but not much. Dripping with gold and silver baubles, festooned with streams of glittery trimmings, angels dangling from pretty little candlesticks, the tree was topped by a shining angel stretching her arms all the way to the high ceiling. This totem of pagan abundance, looking over a small mountain range of beautifully wrapped presents at its base, was not really vulgar - Granny had excellent taste. It was just very, very big.

Grandpop sat at the head of the table, an absurd paper hat from a Christmas cracker wrapped around his bald head and a pipe firmly lodged between his nicotine-stained teeth. He had the appearance of a friendly frog, his round face creased with laughter.

The family conversation might best be described as a kind of creative chaos. The main thing was to be heard in the cacophony of stories and inside jokes. You had to be quick if you were to be noticed. Sharp wit and the skill to tell a good story were essential, preferably at the top of your voice. The worst possible sin was to be a bore.

Faces under the coloured paper hats grew steadily ruddier as candles flickered in the silver candelabra and the contents of the Christmas crackers sprawled across the table amid the walnuts, the dried fruits, and the crystal glasses.

No wonder these occasions could strike an outsider as a trifle overpowering. It was hard to get a word in. We were a tight-knit clan. And yet the family was far from closed to outsiders. On the contrary, my grandparents had a quasi-Oriental concept of hospitality. They took pride in the number of guests they welcomed at St Mary Woodlands. It was a sign of their generosity. Rather like those Christmas cards in the hall, friends were proof of the family's worth, even perhaps of its acceptance.

I cannot say I felt overpowered. But coming - as my sisters and I were - from a relatively provincial Dutch town, the glamour of family Christmas in England made our lives seem rather drab in comparison. If acceptance was an issue, it was about my place in the family, and the culture it represented.

This was not a straightforward matter. Even the tightest-knit clans consist of concentric circles. At the centre, holding it all together, were the grandparents, Granny and Grandpop, Bernard and Winifred ("Bun" and "Win"), around whom everything revolved. The following circles were made up of the next generations. But the family extended further, to circles of great-uncles and aunts, cousins, and nephews and nieces, and then there were even more distant relatives, some of them refugees from 20th-century catastrophes, and an adopted family of 12 Jewish children whom my grandparents had helped to escape from Hitler's Berlin.

An idyll is usually associated with a pastoral scene, a childhood Garden of Eden, a place to which there can be no return. Mine was set in a very English countryside. And indeed, the superiority of Englishness, to my grandparents, was never in doubt. They were far too well travelled and cosmopolitan to look down on foreigners, let alone to exclude them. They were not like the guest at a local Sunday-morning drinks party, who replied to my mother's casual remark, made in a flagging attempt at small talk, that our car in the drive was the only one with foreign number plates, that this was "nothing to be proud of."

On the contrary, English superiority would more often be expressed by being especially polite to foreigners, while being careful not to seem patronising.

And yet my sisters and I were made aware from a very early age that there was something faintly amusing about our foreign background, about the way we spoke an incomprehensible guttural language, or "Double Dutch," as the family would call it. And so, to live up to the idyll of St. Mary Woodlands, I became something far more laughable than being foreign; I became a little Anglophile, an aspiration my grandparents, perhaps feeling secretly flattered, were happy to indulge: cricket bats and checked Viyella shirts for Christmas, regimental ties and blue blazers for my birthdays. My pocket money was spent on comics, like Beano or Eagle, featuring English public schoolboy heroes winning football games, and blond, square-jawed RAF aces downing Messerschmitts.

And yet the Englishness of my grandparents was not as clear-cut as it seemed. For they, too, aspired to a kind of idyll. They also lived up to an ideal. Apart from my grandfather's mother, Estella Ellinger, who was born in Manchester, my great-grandparents all came from Germany. As did Estella's father, Alexander Ellinger. Her mother, Mathilda van Oven, was born in Holland. They were all German Jews.

Which is to say that my grandparents, Bernard Schlesinger and Win Regensburg, were English in the way their German Jewish ancestors were German, and that was, if such a thing were possible, more so, or at least more self-consciously so, than the "natives."

This was partly a matter of class. Already solidly middle-class in Germany, my family did even better in England, where at least one of my two maternal great-grandfathers made a fortune as a stockbroker in the City of London. It is the old immigrant story, assimilation as the sign of higher education and prosperity. Jews like my grandparents, in Germany, France, Holland, or Hungary, wanted to shed their minority status, as though it were an unsightly scar.

Marks of difference - language, customs, dress, even religion, at least of the Orthodox kind - had been discarded. They wished to be accepted as something they genuinely were: loyal citizens steeped, often more so than the Gentiles themselves, in the cultures they had made their own. If anything, there was an overeagerness to do well, to speak German, French, or English more correctly, more beautifully than the Gentiles, to be more deeply versed in the literature or the music - and, of course, have finer Christmas trees.

German Jews in particular are still ridiculed by Jews with Eastern European roots for their stiff manners and highfalutin ways. The typical Yekke, as he is called in Israel, punctilious, pedantic, quick to disapprove, the type of immigrant who insists on dressing in a three-piece suit under the palm trees of the Holy Land, is a figure of fun, as well as being rather despised. It was typical Yekkes who thought the Nazis would never touch them, because they'd fought in the Great War and had the medals to prove it. This type of tragic illusion was less the object of pity than scorn.

That Yekkes often treated poorer, less assimilated Jews with snobbish disdain, as unwelcome riff-raff who would give decent, civilised Jews a bad name, is beyond doubt. My grandparents were not entirely immune to this type of snobbery. The Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal, an Orthodox Jew born in Uruguay, once pointed out to me the important distinction between assimilated and "closeted" Jews. He disapproved of the latter.

I would say my grandparents were more assimilated than closeted, although my grandmother at times had at least one leg behind the closet door. They never converted to Christianity, at any rate, and never denied their Jewish background. My grandfather grew up in an Orthodox household; his father - a great lover of Richard Wagner's music, by the way - had insisted on that. But there was not a trace of his religious upbringing left by the time I knew him (except possibly a hint of grumpiness on Christmas morning).

Jewishness was often a topic of conversation in the family. I have no idea where the family code word "45," meaning Jewish, came from or when it was first used. But my grandmother in particular was always keen to find out whether a new friend or acquaintance was "45". Some people (all my close relations) looked distinctly "45" and some didn't. But it was a neutral term, which bestowed no special merit, or indeed demerit, to the person under scrutiny.

To be Jewish, then, was not a source of shame. My grandparents just didn't want to make a fuss about it, lest others might be tempted to do so. They were born in England, were educated in the usual manner of the English upper middle class: public school, in his case, and Oxford and Cambridge. They were British and had the perfect right to insist on it, and yet their sense of belonging was never simply to be taken for granted.

Their loyalty to Britain and its institutions was perhaps extreme, but it partly came from gratitude. The society in which they were born and bred did not turn on them, as Germany had done on its most loyal Jewish citizens.

When there were instances of anti-Jewish prejudice, Bernard and Win were usually too proud to show that it bothered them. The retired colonel in the local village, who was heard to mutter when my grandparents moved there, "Don't like the name, don't like the money," was a figure of fun in the family, his words quoted as a kind of running gag at the Christmas table. And so Bernard volunteered for army service every time there was a crisis, all the way up to the Cuban missiles, when he was already in his 60s.

It is easy to curl one's lip from the relative safety of a different age at their sense of gratitude. Grateful for what? Now their kind of melting into the gentile world might be considered a form of denial, even cowardice. Why didn't they insist on their true "identity" as Jews?

But I refuse to see their lives in that light. Who is to say what anyone's true identity is anyway? If they made a conscious choice, it was to move away from the narrow circle of their parents, the genteel Hampstead world of German Jewish immigrants, well-off, cultivated, but confined to their own kind. Bernard and Win were not immigrants and felt no need to seek the security of an émigré milieu.

And yet certain aspects of the German Jewish background stuck with them: the worship of classical music, my grandmother's anxiety always to be at her best, never to stick out, to avoid embarrassment at all costs, the exaggerated patriotism, and the almost fetishistic love of family, as a haven of safety.

Inside this haven, the two of them had built an impregnable fortress of their own. More than anything else, including their country, or even their own children, they adored each other. It was there, in their family of two, that they really felt safe. There is something idyllic about such rare unions, romantic and unassailable. When they died, Bernard in 1984 and Win in 1986, the family really disintegrated with them. Once they were gone, the centre did not hold.

I sometimes go on a sentimental journey to St Mary Woodlands. But apart from the familiar landscape, nothing of my idyll remains. The main house looks oddly cramped and is painted in a different colour, the garden looks nothing like the way it did before. I am sure it is still a lovely place for someone. But an idyll can exist only in memory.

The lives of most people, unless they were very famous, slip away into oblivion when those who still remember them die in their turn. These days, few people even leave a record of their existence; whatever is there in digital form will disappear soon.

But Bernard and Win did leave a record, not because they wished to be immortal or even wanted others to see it, but simply because they couldn't bear the thought of throwing it away.

In the barn of their son John's country house in Sussex was a stack of steel boxes filled with mouse droppings and hundreds of letters, the first of which was written in 1915, when Bernard was still at boarding school and Win was studying music in London. The last ones were written in the 1970s. Most of them are love letters, written from the trenches in France in World War I, from Oxford and Cambridge in the 1920s, from Germany in the 1930s, from a variety of places in World War II.

Often, especially when Bernard was away for three years in India as an army doctor during the war, they wrote every day, knowing the letters would take weeks, and sometimes months, to reach the other side.

What interested me were the stories they told each other and themselves about who they were. Questions of class, culture, and nationality can be addressed in a scholarly way, with statistics and sociological theory. But this was of no interest to me. I wanted to find out how two people very close to me dealt with these questions themselves. They are questions I have asked myself in pretty much every book I have written.

The reason is autobiographical. Growing up with more than one culture, with parents of different nationalities and religious backgrounds, forces one to think about one's place in the world. It is the fate of all people who feel for one reason or another that they are in a minority.

A Jew in a society of mostly gentiles, a Muslim in Europe, a black in a predominantly white country, or a homosexual, especially in places where love of your own sex is unaccepted, is forced to consider his or her place more deeply, to make up his or her own story. This implies choice. Some of us have more freedom to choose our own identities than others, depending on time, place, and social position.

I had more freedom than my grandparents. They had more freedom than people from a less privileged background, or Jews faced with more antisemitism. Bernard and Win wrote to one another about their place in the world as insiders who were outsiders, too, a perspective that also marks the films of their son John: Billy Liar, Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, An Englishman Abroad.

By using their own words, I have contrived to produce a kind of novel in letters, with myself as a kind of Greek chorus. What emerged might not be how they would have liked to see themselves. Their portraits inevitably reflect my own preoccupations, so it should be read as a type of memoir as well. And, always, in the background, like a classical score, there is the music that accompanied the lives of two very British Jews, whose favourite piece was composed by Richard Wagner as a private tribute to his wife and children: the Siegfried Idyll. It was first performed in 1870, on Christmas Day.

Extracted from 'Their Promised Land' by Ian Buruma (Atlantic Books, £18.99)