It is the summer of 2015, and the refugee crisis is all over the news. Jonathan Dean, a film and music journalist, is prompted to delve for the first time into his own family history. His grandfather, Heinz Schapira, was a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, sent away as a teenager with his brother just before the outbreak of the second world war. And Heinz’s father, David, had himself been a refugee from Ukraine in the previous war. What do their stories of European migration have to say to us today? “Children fled Nazis in brogues,” the author observes. “Children flee Syria in Velcro trainers. Why are children still fleeing?”
Dean quotes extensively from his relatives’ own accounts: David wrote a memoir, and Heinz kept wartime diaries. Their stories are extraordinary: David Schapira was blinded fighting for the Germans in the first world war, and then sent to a concentration camp during the second; afterwards, he settled back in Vienna as though nothing had happened. His son Heinz, having escaped on a train (not officially an evacuation but similar), spent the war working as a farm labourer in Britain, before becoming a successful executive in the timber trade. (“Very miserable day in rainy Reading,” reads one of his diary entries, showing that some things never change.)
Dean also follows in their footsteps around Europe: in Cologne, through which Heinz passed on his way to London, he observes tourists “taking pictures of what they are told to notice”, and notes the complaints of sexual assault by newly arrived migrants. In Vienna he inspects Heinz’s school report cards, and meets some of today’s refugees. Yousef, a 16-year-old from Iraq, lives with his sister and mother in a single room. He thinks, with diplomatic optimism, the Austrians will be “more welcoming soon”. Dean also meets Adham, a 25-year-old from Damascus, who insists on paying for their coffees in an old-world Viennese cafe. Here the writer asks a brilliant question. On his entire journey from Syria to Austria, how many people did Adham meet who wanted to go to England? He thinks for a moment. “One,” he replies.
And yet here we are, after a Brexit referendum widely interpreted, not least by the present prime minister, as indicating a wish to reduce immigration – though that was nowhere mentioned on the ballot paper, hence the interminable and fundamentally undecidable contests over what the vote really meant. Dean goes to a pretty home counties town where his family lived, which voted predominantly Leave and where Ukip is strong. These people don’t like refugees, Dean thinks, looking at an old family photograph and wondering about the current owner of their former home. “Who sits in the garden where a refugee stood proudly in 1981 with his refugee father?”
The spread of fear and loathing about a purportedly unsustainable influx of migrants is nothing new, of course. “The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage,” ran one British newspaper story in 1938. (Oddly, Dean does not name the newspaper in question: you will not be surprised to learn that it was the Daily Mail.) Dean is especially good on the ridiculous idea that there is just not enough room in the UK for more migrants. There is, of course, plenty of uninhabited space, even in the capital, as the author sees from the window of his daily train through east London. And yet, as he points out wonderingly, “the idea Britain is full is no longer a shamefully racist thing”. Near the end of the book he interviews Stella Creasy, his local MP, who puts the liberal point well in vivid post-Trump imagery: “If I thought it would be better for Walthamstow if we built a wall around the whole of Britain I’d be the first digging. What is better for Walthamstow is a Britain that’s open, confident, tolerant. But we haven’t won that argument with people.”
Readers looking for deep intellectual analysis of these topics might be left feeling unfulfilled. “I Google ‘learn from history’ to see if we ever learn anything from history,” Dean writes at one point. “I come across George Bernard Shaw’s quote, ‘We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.’” There is something quintessentially modern about that wry revealing of the casual nature of the writer’s research. (There is an unfortunate sneer, too, when he refers to “the so-called Great War (fought by so-called Great Britain)”, as though the “Great” in either case meant “ruddy marvellous”.) Mind you, Dean is no uncritical info-age millennial either, referring to Twitter as “that cesspool ... a digital realm for journalists and the lonely”. When he travels to Ukraine, two local teenagers tell him that, on the one hand, the internet “gives me the idea that I belong to the world”, but on the other it is “full of fake”. Which sounds about right.
Overall, then, this is an admirably humane and curious book. The upside to Dean’s chatty, everyman approach – migration, he says, is “a really twitchy and layered issue” – is a disarmingly modest refusal to pretend that he has any answers to the awkward questions he rightly raises. In the meantime, the last word must go to the frankly amazing lines written by his great-grandfather David, not long before his death in 1984. “Despite the difficulties occasioned by my fate,” the war veteran and concentration-camp survivor writes to his son, “I have maintained towards this highly disagreeable world a fairly positive attitude.”
• I Must Belong Somewhere is published by Weidenfeld. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
