The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Is there a better book about being Jewish?
This history of a glamorous family in exile in the 20th century is a masterpiece, discovers Tanya Gold
House of Glass is the story of the journalist Hadley Freeman’s grandmother Sala Glahs and her brothers Jehuda, Jakob and Sender. It is the product of 20 years of research, and it amounts, by sheer cumulation of detail, to a near-perfect study of Jewish identity – of Jewish being – in the 20th century. If there is a better book about the anguish of Jewish survival I have yet to read it.
They were born in Chrzanow, Poland. Their father Reuben was a gentle intellectual. Their mother Chaya was a matriarch of myth. They were poor and loved, but murderous nationalism was coming. A pogrom led by a Catholic acquaintance led them to follow their Ornstein cousins and flee, in instalments, to Paris. It was a false haven, but you know that.
They wanted to belong, and they changed their names: Jehuda to Henri; Jakob to Jacques; Sender to Alex; Sala to Sarah. Each had a very distinctive character, and tragedy. Henri was practical and hard-working. His “careful book-keeping was a reflection of his naturally precise nature but also of his lifelong fear that the authorities would one day call him to account because he wasn’t truly French”. Alex was “the hungry little boy in Chrzanow determined to scrape his way from the bottom of the sewer to reach the stars”. He became a couturier who employed the young Christian Dior; he was later an art dealer and confidant of Pablo Picasso. Jacques was a dreamer. Alex and Sarah were obsessed with Paris and its fashion – “famished for this beauty”.
This was fashion as belonging, but war was coming. Alex and Jacques joined the Foreign
Legion to fight for France. To save her life, Sarah was bullied into marriage with a man she didn’t love: Freeman’s American grandfather Bill, who loved her, but could never possess her. To make her leave Europe they told her he was a millionaire from Manhattan who worked in fashion; in fact, he owned a petrol station in Long Island. Sarah lived a life of suffering and exile, scratching her true – and lost – love’s face out of photographs.
In the most affecting passages Freeman writes how, as a child, she sensed her grandmother’s anguish, and fled from it. Freeman has written about her own mental health – as a young woman she had anorexia, a kind of self-annihilation – and I ponder the extent to which she inherited Sarah’s trauma, and internalised her pain, and so could not, consciously, be close to her. It took her 18 years to write this book; writing about Sarah, she says, was like “staring straight into the sun”. Sarah tore up the photographs of her life in Paris, but
HOUSE OF GLASS
House of Glass took 18 years to write, and it felt like ‘staring straight at the sun’
someone mended them, likely Bill, “walking behind her and picking up the pieces and taping them together as quickly as she could destroy them”.
The brothers stayed in France when the Nazis came. Chaya remained exactly the same; just thinking of a Yiddish-speaking woman eating kosher food and surviving the entire war in Nazi-occupied France makes me laugh until my face aches. Alex was saved by his collaborator connections and his bravado. When he was put on a train to a camp, he smashed the roof panel in and jumped off. Some Jews are hard to conceal. Alex once told a Gestapo officer: “I’m a Jew and you can go f--- yourself.” Henri was denounced by his Parisian neighbours and survived, but most of the Ornstein cousins were murdered. One infant – three-yearold Armand – had to be moved because he “told some of the neighbours that he was Jewish”. I wept ceaselessly, reading this.
All the Glasses are paradigms of Jewish identity and Jewish choices – Henri the careful, Alex the defiant, Sarah the exile – but Jacques is the most tragic. He did not need to be denounced, for “he denounced himself ”. Despite the pleas of his brothers, he and his wife registered as Jews in September 1940. “If you did what they said,” writes Freeman, trying to understand, “why would they hurt you?”
Jacques was taken to Pithiviers work camp, but, amazingly, returned to Paris after he was given leave to visit his wife and newborn daughter. “‘Run, they [his brothers] told him. This is the chance of a lifetime! They will kill you. Listen to us. Run.’
‘My Jacques gave his word,’ said his wife Mila, ‘he must go back.’”
Jacques returned to the camp – Freeman imagines the guards’ scornful laughter – and was transported to AuschwitzBirkenau, 11 miles from where he was born. Freeman asks: did he
know? “Had he spotted the thin Galician birch trees through the tiny window in the train, and did they look familiar to him? Perhaps he thought, no matter how hard a Jewish man tries, even if he fights for another country he will still get sent back to the place of his father’s grave instead of enjoying his daughter in her cot – always the past for the Jew, never the future.” Jacques worked for three months in Birkenau, “building his own tomb”. He did not return.
The war ended, and the Glasses were left with the wreckage of survival. Henri and Alex grew rich, but they never helped Sarah to return to France; she died in America, her past in a shoebox in her cupboard. One agonising story tells how Henri almost allowed his non-Jewish business partner to cheat him out of his fortune, from fear. Does it never end? When Freeman visits Chrzanow she finds anti-Semitic graffiti on a wall near where the Glasses lived: Anty Jude. Always the past for the Jew, never the future. Almost all the third generation work in fashion, “famished for this beauty” still.
I think about the Glahses constantly now: particularly Henri, who died with an English dictionary near him, so he could know the great-niece who, when she could bear the looking, wrote his story. Freeman did look straight into the sun, and I can only guess what it cost her. I don’t hesitate to call it a masterpiece.