Jack, Sadie, and infant Elizabeth Rosenblum arrive in England from Berlin in 1937, the only ones of their families to make it out; no one else was able to get exit visas. Jack devotes himself to assimilating perfectly, revising a list he got from a refugee pamphlet as he goes. However, he learns that no matter how much you assimilate, you're still a Jew. And so he sells his home in London and buys a country property, all without telling his wife, so he can build his own golf course. None of the ones he has applied to will let him in, you see. And he's never actually golfed. But to be an Englishman, you must belong to a golf course. This is an unwritten rule that Jack has observed as existing in practice and so he diligently tries to follow it.

This is a book about survival. Jack is endlessly focused on the future and that fact that he very rarely thinks on who has been massacred and what has been destroyed is highlighted by Sadie's decades-long mourning and depression. They have so little in common as the years go on and can barely relate to each other, but they rely strongly on each other still being there, and Sadie especially relies on Jack's endless optimism as a touchstone and a reason to keep going; when she is in crisis and nearly accidentally kills herself, Jack is the one who rescues her and saves her life. They do not have a good marriage, but neither of them ever thinks of leaving each other; they both know they need each other, because there's no one else left.

Jack would be an infuriating character if it were not so clear to him and to the reader why he keeps pressing on and doing as he does. These are two characters responding to what happened and continues to happen. No matter what, Jack is still the Jew, and the best thing that happens to him because of being Jewish is being invited to drinks at someone's house so everyone can laugh at him and his strange, earnest ways, and then later undermine his attempts at building a golf course.

The golf course is, of course, a symbol. Another character even points out that if it's golfing he wants, he can join a Jewish golf club. But it's not about golf. It's about Becoming English, as defined by written and unwritten rules, in order for himself and his family to survive.

Before building the golf course, Jack has never played golf. He doesn't play a single second of golf until the golf course is completed and opened. He doesn't even practice. Because this is never, ever, ever actually about golf.

I don't understand the pull quote on the front calling the book "hilarious" and on the back calling it "very funny". While there is occasional humor, this book is a tragedy. I burst out crying three times, the second bad enough to have to clean my glasses, and the third requiring a long break to decide if I wanted to push through to the end or if I should just leave it be.

This book is only not a complete tragedy because it ends triumphantly for Jack's goals. But even then, the epilogue has Sadie buried on a hill outside of a cemetery (because even after fifty years in England, she won't be buried in a churchyard -- and those are the only two options?), and her grave is marked by a flagpole, and explicitly not with a gravestone. This, after the book takes pains earlier to describe the fate of the massacred family members as not having graves or gravestones.

So, in the end, Sadie assimilated fully, gave up everything that made her different, lost even the three photos of her family and the last gift her mother ever gave her, and to show for it, even she doesn't get a gravestone.

And what's the full assimilation like for Jack? He fails to assimilate into London, but assimilates into village life in the Dorset countryside, which is symbolized by, in other things, constantly drinking alcohol from a flask, because that's how you fit in.

I will note that I give this book a completely free pass on something that I usually hate: it renders low-class/poor people's accents phonetically. This makes it hard to understand some characters, including a Heartfelt And Plot Important Deathbed Note Written Down By Someone Who Talks In An Accent, but the book is doing it for a very clear purpose. These people are allowed to have accents that mark them as different. These people are allowed to speak an English that is not fully "correct". These people are allowed to mock and ignore the law. These people are indisputably Englishmen, and Jack can never, ever, actually fully become one of them, because his accent he can't get rid of marks him as foreign, even when he gets rid of everything, including both his first and his last name, that marks him as the Jew.

And this is partially why their daughter is able to assimilate completely while Jack and Sadie never fully can: she's doesn't remember what they've lost, and Jack was so adamant on assimilation that Sadie had to pick and choose what she could share with their daughter, and chose German fairytales and light family stories. Elizabeth has nothing to give up to become English; her parents gave it up on her behalf: her birth name when they came over, everything else afterward. So she sheds her last name, as the only remnant connecting her to Berlin, and that's nothing to her to have done. Meanwhile, Jack and Sadie are both wracked with emotion when they follow her into the last name change, because for them, it's not giving up nothing.

This book is a tragedy, and part of the "happy" ending is that the golf course returns to the land in the end anyway. Which makes sense, since Jack didn't buy it with the idea of making it a golf course, decided to turn it into one only after that, and the terrain was completely unsuited to becoming a golf course. It got shoved that way anyway. Possibly another metaphor, I guess.