While much has been written about British attitudes to the Jewish refugees from Hitler who fled to this country after 1933, little attention has been paid to the ways in which those refugees perceived and depicted their (often somewhat reluctant) hosts. From their impressions on arrival, through the tumultuous events of World War II and mass internment, and on into the long period of integration after 1945, Anthony Grenville expertly traces the development of refugee responses to their new homeland. Drawing on a wide range of novels, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries and letters by Jewish refugees, he recreates the course of a complex and sometimes fraught relationship, but one that ultimately arrived at a largely settled resolution.
Anthony Grenville is Chair of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, University of London, and was Consultant Editor of the Association of Jewish Refugees Journal, 2006-17.