Settler's saga

Natasha Solomons. Photo / Supplied

Coming across an original copy of a pamphlet handed out to refugees during World War II was a eureka moment for Natasha Solomons when she was working on her first novel, Mr Rosenblum's List (Sceptre, $34.99).

"I was in the reading room of the British Library," she tells me over the phone from her home in Dorset.

"I wanted to stand on my chair and shout but I didn't because I thought I'd be thrown out."

The pamphlet, distributed by the German Jewish Aid Committee and titled Useful Advice And Friendly Guidance To All Refugees, was intended to help newcomers to assimilate. Its rather quaint advice includes cautions such as: "The Englishman greatly dislikes ostentation or unconventionality of dress," and, "The Englishman attaches great importance to modesty and understatement."

This leaflet was to form the foundation of Solomons' warm and charming debut.

Mr Rosenblum's List tells of a refugee couple struggling to make a new life in a strange country. While Jack Rosenblum does all he can to fit in and become a proper Englishman, his wife, Sadie, grieves for those she left behind and bakes elaborate, towering German tortes to remember them by.

In part the book is based on the history of Solomons' grandparents Paul and Margot Shields, who fled Berlin in the late 1930s to settle in England.

"My grandmother died when I was very young so I don't remember her at all," Solomons says, "but we lived next door to my grandfather so I spent a lot of time with him and his friends and I wanted to write a book celebrating that generation of European refugees."

The plot hinges on Jack Rosenblum's conviction that the ultimate expression of Englishness is to join a golf club. When he is turned down repeatedly for memberships he embarks on the ambitious project of building his own golf course beside his Dorset cottage, with help and hindrance from a cast of local characters.

"That part is entirely fictional," Solomons says. "My grandfather didn't build a golf course although he did play golf very badly. He was the perfect English gentleman - he was the man that Jack would have aspired to be. He was elegant, he painted, he went to concerts. But all his friends were German Jews and as soon as he spoke you knew that was where he was born."

The recipes that belonged to her grandmother also provided Solomons with inspiration. They are handwritten in a tattered exercise book that is partly a diary and a history of her journey to assimilation. "At the beginning the recipes are for German tortes and rich gateaux," Solomons says. "Then there's a point where she is homesick and she's gathering recipes from other refugees and trying to horde the tastes of home. And by the end it's recipes for marmalade cake and British baking."

In its latter stages the novel looks at the downside of assimilation, the loss of cultural identity and the breaking of the threads that link the generations.

Solomons, who wasn't raised Jewish, says she felt quite torn as a young woman and at university made a deliberate effort to reconnect with her culture. "Later generations can feel lost," she says. "They feel they don't belong in either place. In my late teens and early 20s I wasn't sure where I fitted in. I broke rules I didn't know existed. Once I went to Shabbat [the Jewish Sabbath] and arrived with a handbag. I had no idea you weren't meant to carry one because it counts as work."

Through her husband David, whose family has a stronger sense of Jewish tradition, Solomons has come closer to her past and her culture.

The couple live and work together in what she describes as a tumbledown Dorset cottage, where they make their living writing screenplays. "One person types while the other paces," says Solomons. "At the beginning of the project we're very polite and by the end we're elbowing each other out of the way."

Currently they're embarking on the screen adaptation of Mr Rosenblum's List. Solomons is also writing a second novel and completing a PhD in 18th-century poetry.

"I write because I want to be read, I want to be heard," she says. "It's a selfish act: listen to me, I want to communicate something."

One of the things she most enjoyed communicating in Mr Rosenblum's List are fables about the area in which she lives. "Dorset always seemed an otherworldly and magical place to me when I was a child," she says. "My grandfather used to tell me local legends as bedtime stories. It's such an ancient place you feel as though the myths and legends are written on the landscape. I find that magical."

Solomons says her novel is partly a love affair with Dorset and rural life. "But it's also a love story between a husband and wife who have grown apart. It's about the joys of discovering later in life that you love the person you happen to be married to."