House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a 20th-century Jewish Family, by Hadley Freeman
KATE HUBBARD House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a 20th-century Jewish Family
It was Hadley Freeman’s original intention to write a book about her grandmother, Sara, and her relationship with fashion.
She remembers Sara not just for her clothes, but also for an air of melancholy that hinted at some ‘inner emotional drama’. But then, rootling around in Sara’s closet, she finds a shoebox containing, among other things, a defaced photograph, a letter denouncing ‘la famille Glass’ and a sketch by Picasso, and she realises that there’s another, bigger, story to tell about the lives of her Jewish family, her grandmother and great uncles, through the 20th century.
Henri, Jacques, Alex and Sara Glass were born as Jehuda, Jakob, Sender and Sala Glahs in Chrzanów, Poland, a typical shtetl out of Fiddler on the Roof, where, in the early-20th century, Jews lived harmoniously alongside Catholic Poles.
It wasn’t to last. A pogrom in 1918 saw the livelihoods of Chrzanów’s Jews destroyed overnight by their neighbours. Against a background of economic hardship and rising nationalism, Jews were labelled as Bolsheviks and outsiders: untrustworthy, disruptive and self-interested.
Jacques was the first Glass to go to Paris, in 1920, setting up as a furrier; his siblings followed. If they’d stayed at home, they would probably have ended up in the gas chambers, as did 90 per cent of Poland’s Jews, mainly denounced by Poles. Yet the current Polish President denies that Poland bears any responsibility for the Holocaust. As she writes her book, Freeman is all too aware of a 21st-century resurgence of anti-semitism.
The Glass siblings embraced France. Henri, tall, handsome and scholarly, became an engineer and invented a kind of microfilm machine that would make him a rich man. Alex, ‘small, bald and tough like a bullet’, looked every inch the Polish peasant he was, and yet he conceived the unlikely ambition of becoming a couturier and, by sheer force of will, succeeded. He ‘made clothes that were Frencher than French’ and mixed in the worlds of fashion and art, a friend of Dior, Chagall and Picasso.
Sara grew up to be a beauty, found herself a job as a pattern-designer and had a fiancé whom she loved. Then, in 1937, just when life for Jews in France was becoming uncomfortable, Alex brought an American, Bill Freiman (later Freeman), to dinner. Halfway through the meal, Bill announced that he was madly in love with Sara and begged her to come to America. Sara sailed off ‘to marry a man she didn’t know and liked less’, believing Bill was a big shot in fashion who could save the entire Glass family from the Nazis.
Freeman spells out the anti-semitism of Vichy France and the way it set out to remove immigrant Jews. Henri and his wife went into hiding. Jacques, always the mild and passive sibling, registered himself as Jewish, leading to his internment and death in Auschwitz. Alex, the big character here – the showman, the spinner of tales – had a war full of drama. He joined the Foreign Legion and distinguished himself. Later he opened a salon in Cannes, selling clothes to the wives of collaborators and German officers, but also working for the Resistance. He was arrested by the Gestapo, escaped by throwing himself out of a train, and was hidden on a farm in the Auvergne, where, as Freeman discovers, he’s still remembered.
Henri, Alex and Sara survived the war. Alex never let up. Alone among the siblings, he clung to his Yiddish accent.
What drove him? The fear of losing everything? The belief that Jews have to work twice as hard to get anywhere?
After the war, he resurrected his fashion house, with Ava Gardner and I M Pei among his clients, before reinventing himself as a highly successful art dealer.
Bill, who owned a garage (nothing to do with fashion), loved his chic French wife (she looks exquisite in Alex’s clothes), but he was in no position to bring her family to the US and he could never make her love him. She became a dutiful Long Island housewife, a devoted mother and, in her 70s, the grandmother Freeman remembers, still pining for France, still waiting ‘to live the life she wanted to live’.