Borrowed Lands is a charming and utterly original novel about the sorrows and Joys of the immigrant experience, as seen through the eyes of the Ansbachers, a blue collar German Jewish couple. Unlike the many novels which depict the Eastern European response to the Holocaust, Merkinws book focuses on the particular plight of German - jewish refugees, caught between nostalgia for thier lost culture of Gemutlichkeit and gratitude for the borrowed but bewildering culture of America. The Ansbchers and their friends make a piquant and vivid impression: intially inconsolable over all they have left behind, they emerge undaunted in the face of change.