HOUSE OF GLASS
The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family
Hadley Freeman

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Hadley Freeman 2020

Hadley Freeman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Images here © Natasha de Betak and here © Billy Farrell/BFA.com

Image here believed to be by Pablo Picasso and image here believed to be by René Gruau.

Broken Glass by Arthur Miller. Copyright © Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, 1994, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008322632

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008322649

Version: 2020-06-12

Dedication

For my father, Ron Freeman, and my Grandma Sala

Epigraph

‘Getting this hysterical about [anti-Semitism] on the other side of the world is sane?’

‘When she talks about it, it’s not on the other side of the world, it’s on the next block.’

‘And that’s sane?’

‘I don’t know what it is! I just get the feeling sometimes that she KNOWS something, something that … It’s like she’s connected to some … some wire that goes half around the world, some truth that other people are blind to.’

ARTHUR MILLER, Broken Glass, 1994

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Family Tree

Introduction

1. The Glahs Family – The Shtetl

2. The Glass Siblings – Immigration

3. Henri – Assimilation

4. Jacques – Passivity

5. Alex – Defiance

6. Sara – Emigration

7. Bill – America

8. Henri and Sonia – Denounced

9. Jacques – Captured

10. Alex – Myth-making

11. The Siblings – The Ordinary and the Extraordinary

12. Alex – Social Mobility

13. The End of the Glass Siblings

14. The Next Generations – An Epilogue

Footnotes

End Notes

Acknowledgements

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

FAMILY TREE

Sala eating lunch in Deauville, under Alex Ornstein’s umbrella.

INTRODUCTION

I STOOD UP to shut the closet door and that’s when I spotted the shoebox, right at the back, behind a pile of leather handbags. It was burnished red, although it looked almost grey, covered in over a decade’s worth of dust. Surely, I thought, it would just contain another pair of slightly battered kitten-heeled sandals. But still, I’d come all this way, I might as well look inside. So I sat back on the floor, pulled it out and opened it. I did not find shoes. Instead, it was filled with the secrets my grandmother had managed to keep all her life and some years beyond.

The road that led me to rifling through my grandmother’s closet a dozen years after she died began, for me, twenty-three years earlier, in 1983 when I was five years old. That was the year my parents took me to Europe for the first time to meet my French family: my grandmother’s oldest brother and his wife, Henri and Sonia Glass, another brother, Alex Maguy, and their last surviving cousins, Alex and Mania Ornstein. My grandmother, Sala, also joined us there, flying over from her home in Florida, where she lived with her American husband, my grandfather, Bill.

My dad was keen for us to meet them all, perhaps to balance out our family tree: where my mother’s side was fruitful, with its abundance of American aunts, uncles and cousins scattered generously around the United States, from Washington DC to Cincinnati to Seattle, my father’s side was comparatively barren. Until this trip it had consisted in my mind solely of my grandparents and my uncle, my father’s younger brother, Rich, all clustered together in Miami. I knew my grandmother had had to leave her relatives behind in France when she escaped what was vaguely described to me as ‘the war’ and this, my father said, was why I didn’t have much family on his side. He didn’t explain where the family was on his very American father’s side, and I was too young then to think to ask why.

My mother’s family was warm, rambunctious and close, and I always looked forward to seeing my cousins, who I thought of as quasi-siblings. But when we visited my paternal grandparents, they snapped at one another continuously, which scared me because I never saw my parents fight. Also, for reasons I was in no way capable of articulating then, I found my grandmother difficult. If pressed, I would have said she was ‘weird’, but what I meant was that she seemed sad, and sad adults are confusing for children, especially ones as sheltered as I was. When we visited them in Miami, my grandfather, in his white trousers and golf shirts, would sit with us by the hotel pool on the candy-coloured sun loungers, enjoying the sunshine, letting my sister and me twirl his enormous moustache. My grandmother would sit under an umbrella, separate from us. She was further protected from the sun by a wide-brimmed hat, various Hermès – or Hermès-esque – silk scarves wound in complicated knots around her neck, mini Dior handbag in her lap. She looked as distinctly French as my grandfather looked American, with the naturally soft, elegant looks of a Renoir painting but now overlaid with the melancholy of a Hopper one.

Often by the pool she would read the French fashion magazines her brothers sent her from Paris, and despite having lived in America for forty years by the time I was born, she clung on tightly to her French accent. So it made sense to me that she would come with us to France. After all, she was, emphatically, French.

I flew with my parents from New York to Paris, and then took a train to Deauville, a seaside resort in Normandy. Deauville looked then and still looks now frozen in the mid-twentieth century, with its grand hotels and long beach dotted with large, colourful beach umbrellas, to which liveried waiters brought three-course meals on silver trays. We went there to meet the French relatives because that is where they liked to go on holiday from their homes in Paris, albeit rarely with one another.

Even though I was only five at the time, my memories of this holiday are clearer than of ones I took in my teens and twenties. Partly this was from the novelty of being outside of America for the first time, and the experience was as jarringly formative as the first day of school, or my first job. But it’s also because my family takes so many photos, and more photos were taken of this holiday than of most people’s weddings, mainly by the family photographers, my grandmother’s brother, Henri, and my father. We are also a family of anecdotalists, and it is impossible for me to separate now what I actually remember about this trip, and what I remember from the photos and stories told afterwards. Am I remembering actual memories or are they memories of memories? In my family, the line between the two is not always clear. But everything I have written here about this trip has been corroborated by those wise enough to make this distinction better than me (my parents, in other words).

ON OUR FIRST NIGHT in Deauville we arranged to meet everyone at the front of the hotel dining room before dinner. I assumed that my French family would turn out to be like my American one, and I’d be running up and down the beach with my new relatives the way I ran around Cincinnati with my cousins, because in my five years of experience that’s what extended families were like. But when we arrived in the dining room, a group of impossibly old people was waiting for us, none of whom looked predisposed to run anywhere. Only two of them could speak English, Alex Maguy and Sonia. The rest just smiled and nodded at me and I, gripping my mother’s hand, shyly did the same back. Deauville, it turned out, was nothing like Cincinnati. So it was with some relief that I saw my grandmother arriving, the last of the group – at least I knew her and she spoke English. But instead of joining us, she hung back, watching her siblings and cousins. Just as I was about to go over to her, I noticed something I’d never seen before: she was crying. And then she turned around and rushed out of the room.

‘What’s wrong with Grandma?’ I asked my mother, but she shook her head at me and held her finger to her lips. I looked up at my father for an answer but he was looking towards where his mother had disappeared and went after her.

Alex Maguy – whose real surname was Glass, like Henri and Sonia, as well as my grandmother originally, and it didn’t occur to me to ask why he’d apparently changed it – had a cabana on the beach, and my parents said I could use it to change in and out of my swimsuit. Having one’s own cabana seemed to me the absolute pinnacle of cool, but that was before I saw what Alex Ornstein had on the beach: his own giant umbrella, red with a blue flag on top, and every day we would all meet under it for lunch, attended to by smartly dressed waiters. Even though it was Alex Ornstein’s umbrella, Alex Maguy dominated those lunches. He was small, bald and tough like a bullet, but he loved talking with my father, as well as with his cousin, Alex Ornstein, who he occasionally embraced fondly. He didn’t give hugs to my sister or me, but he seemed to enjoy talking with us, telling us about the famous artists he knew, none of whom we’d ever heard of, because we were, respectively, three and five years old. When I got lost on the beach one day, it was Alex Maguy and his cabana I looked for, because I knew he’d know how to get me home.

Like my grandmother, Sonia was short and had red hair, but where Sala was thin, quiet and melancholic, Sonia was a solid ball of vibrating energy. With her bright hair, pink lipstick and blue eyeshadow, she looked like a firecracker. She taught my sister and me how to play bridge and introduced us to pain au chocolat, which was even more exciting than bridge. In the mornings she would meet us in the hotel lobby and walk us onto the beach, where she seemed to know every person on the boardwalk.

‘Who was that?’ I asked once, after she’d had a long, involved conversation with an older American lady about their respective dogs.

‘I have no idea,’ she replied, marching onwards.

Sonia’s husband Henri was, at 6 feet, about a foot taller than his wife and siblings, but gentler than them, and at eighty-three still strikingly handsome. He would catch my eye across the table and make apologetic smiles for not being able to speak English, and he would often hold my grandmother, stroking her hair like she was still his baby sister. When Sonia and Alex Maguy argued viciously over lunch Henri would just sit back, letting it blow over. We all knew you shouldn’t get between a firecracker and a bullet.

Alex and Mania Ornstein were the frailest and in many ways the easiest-going members of the groups, often acting as peace-brokers between Sonia and Alex Maguy. Being an Ornstein seemed to be less complicated than being a Glass.

Hadley in Deauville, next to Alex Ornstein’s umbrella.

Despite Deauville’s differences from Cincinnati, I had a wonderful holiday. I was introduced to French culture essentials, such as triple-scoop ice-cream cones and baguettes. But the grown-ups occasionally seemed to be grumpy, especially Sonia and Alex Maguy, who were barely able to sit at the same table by the end of the holiday. This was the first time in decades that they had all spent any time together. It was also to be the last.

At the end of the week, I went back to the United States with my parents and sister and soon after, slowly, inexorably, everyone I met in Deauville died. My grandmother died in 1994, when I was sixteen. She had made a life for herself in America but she never stopped seeming sad to me, and her sadness never stopped unnerving me. As a result I never let her get close to me. By the time she died, I was closed off in my own sadness, hospitalised for anorexia, which kept me from her funeral. For years afterwards, thinking about all this made me feel things I still couldn’t articulate so, again, I probably would have said it made me feel ‘weird’, but what I really meant was that it made me feel terrible. So I deliberately didn’t think about her, or any of my French family, at all.

But when I became an adult, I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking of them. Moments I had barely noticed at the time, yet which had made enough of an impact to leave a footprint in my memory, began to surface: my grandmother reaching out for Henri’s hand in Deauville, as if he – or she – were about to drift away; Alex all alone in his grand apartment in Paris in the 1990s, surrounded by Picasso and Matisse paintings; Sonia and Alex not even speaking to one another at my bat’mitzvah, despite living almost their whole lives as neighbours in Paris. I was ashamed of how I’d pushed my grandmother away, and that I’d never asked my French relatives about their pasts when they were all alive. But then, no one else did either: my father, my uncle Rich, and Henri and Sonia’s daughter Danièle hardly ever talked to their parents about their pasts.

We all knew lightly pencilled outlines of stories, but nothing concrete, and certainly nothing that seemed provable. I knew that my grandmother, along with her mother and brothers, lived in Paris in the 1930s. At some point, through Alex Maguy, she met my American grandfather and went with him to the States. I knew that Alex had fought in the war, and was then captured and sent to a concentration camp, but somehow escaped, and I knew he had worked as a fashion designer and then an art dealer after the war. I knew there was also another brother who had not survived the war. About Henri and Sonia’s past, I knew almost nothing.

It felt increasingly apt that the one time I had met them all was in Deauville, because Deauville is a picture-perfect image of an idealised French past. My grandmother – with her chic French fashion, her home full of French art and magazines – was herself an image of idealised Frenchness and, in her obvious homesickness, embodied a longing for the France of her past. I knew there was a story, but even thinking about it felt like touching a bruise and I started alternately tapping this sore spot and then running away in horror at what I was doing. Just an afternoon trip to an archive to look for the Glasses’ birth certificates, for example, would exhaust me so much emotionally I’d have to take a two-hour nap afterwards. I hid my early files and notebooks in the backs of various cupboards around my flat, kidding myself that I wasn’t doing what I was, in fact, starting to do.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I came up with an idea of how to write about my grandmother in what seemed like a painless way: I would write about her relationship with fashion. By now, I was working as a journalist in London, and my grandmother had used her wardrobe to make a defiant statement about her identity. While other Jewish grandmothers in Miami wore shapeless shift dresses or badly fitting clothes in garish prints, my grandmother always looked like she was going to a fashion show, even if she was just going to the supermarket. Her hair and make-up were always impeccable, her accessories exquisite. She wore distinctly French styles – Yves Saint Laurent-like peasant tops, Chanel-esque jackets – proudly emphasising her non-Americanness through her clothes.

At this point, my uncle Rich was living in my grandparents’ former apartment and, fortunately for me, he hadn’t thrown away any of her old things. So I flew there, simply intending to go through my grandmother’s closet and describe her wardrobe, using it as a sort of meta way to write about her, because writing simply about her without any proxy still felt like staring straight into the sun. And so, after arriving at what was now my uncle’s apartment, I opened her closet door and began.

Her dresses were still carefully preserved in the dry cleaners’ plastic wrap, and still smelled of her mix of Chanel perfume and Guerlain face powder (even her cosmetics were strictly French). I sat on the floor, making sketches of her shoes, her bags, her scarves, until I’d filled up my notebook. And then I saw the shoebox at the back. This is what I found inside:

a small photo album with a carved wooden cover, filled with pictures of Henri and Alex looking younger than I’d ever seen them. There were also several photos of my grandmother as a child. Later in the album there were photos of her as a young woman embracing a man whose face had been scraped out by someone’s – presumably my grandmother’s – fingernail;

a professional photo of my grandmother in her late twenties that someone had ripped into quarters, and taped back together, but missing one quarter;

a couple of photocopied pages from a book titled Dressmakers of France;

three letters from someone called ‘Kiki’, all dated during the 1940s and sent from Los Angeles, but in French;

photos of a balding man in round spectacles I’d never seen before, including one in which he was in army uniform, and two in which he was with a group of men. On several of the photos my grandmother had written in her distinctive cursive ‘Jacques’;

a pencil drawing of Jacques, mounted on cardboard, on which the artist had written ‘Camp de Pithiviers, 22. VI.1941’;

a rectangular metal plate on which the words ‘GLASS, Prisonnier Cambrai, 1940’ were written;

a photocopied note on which someone had written, in French, that ‘la famille Glass’ was hiding in Paris under an assumed name;

a telegram from the International Committee of the Red Cross, apologising for the ‘distressing news contained within’;

photos of Henri, Sonia and Danièle when she was a baby;

newspaper clippings about Alex Maguy;

several photos of Alex with Pablo Picasso;

a scrappy piece of paper folded into quarters on which someone had drawn a man, pointing a gun at his own head, and the tip of a cigarette had burned through the paper where the gun was pointing at the man’s head. It was signed ‘Avec amitié, Picasso’.

I put everything back in the shoebox, the shoebox in my bag and flew home the next day. I knew I had a story now, and it wasn’t about fashion.

Over the next decade, I followed these clues to trace the lives of my grandmother and her brothers. Sometimes they confirmed and filled in stories I’d already vaguely known, sometimes they told me things I’d never have imagined about my family. In some cases I uncovered truths that I know were meant to be hidden for ever, and I then seriously questioned the morality of what I was doing, rummaging around in my relatives’ closets that they’d long ago closed for the last time. After all, that I had found my grandmother’s shoebox of tokens from the past was not, I knew, a sign that she had wanted it to be discovered: it was a testament to how quickly she was incapacitated by her stroke that she was unable to destroy it before she died.

Yet I also knew that the stories I found could not be allowed to fade away, like a black and white photo in the back of a closet. The more I researched, the more the story went beyond the personal past to the political present, and it is probably no coincidence that I finally committed to writing this book in the shadow of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Neither of those political shifts was about keeping the Jews out, but they were about keeping out vaguely defined ‘outsiders’.

Sala and Bill in Long Island in the 1950s.

Alongside that, open anti-Semitism was on the rise throughout Europe in a way I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, from the far right and the far left. A 2018 survey found that one in four Europeans believe Jews have ‘too much influence in conflict and wars across the world’, and one in five think they have ‘too much influence in media and politics’.[1] In France, which is where most of my family’s story is set, anti-Semitic acts rose by 74 per cent between 2017 and 2018;[2] meanwhile in America, the Anti-Defamation League reported that in that same period anti-Semitic attacks doubled.[3] Of course, it’s easier to ignore the lessons of the past when the past itself has faded to nothing: according to two recent surveys 41 per cent of Americans do not know what Auschwitz is[4] and one in three Europeans know ‘little or nothing’ about the Holocaust.[5] Reading these news stories quashed any concerns I had that writing about the past, or my family, was self-indulgent.

But my obsession with this story had little to do with political prescience on my part. Instead, it was because of the people involved, each one such an extraordinary force of personality that I couldn’t shake them off decades after they died.

My grandmother and her brothers, once so close, took very different paths during the war, and each of their stories represents a separate strand of the Jewish experience through the twentieth century. Learning about them provided me with not just a map for what was behind me, but one that explained where we all are today. ‘If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future,’ Chaim Potok writes in Davita’s Harp. What I found about the past and present is in this book.

Sender, Sala (centre) and an Ornstein cousin in Chrzanow in about 1916.

1
THE GLAHS FAMILY – The Shtetl
Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1900s

HENRI, JACQUES, ALEX AND SARA GLASS loved being French, and the reason was that they weren’t French and their names weren’t Henri, Jacques, Alex and Sara Glass. They were born Jehuda, Jakob, Sender and Sala Glahs in what is now Poland but was then still Austria-Hungary. This caused further confusion about the nationality of the Glasses in life and death: Alex was often described in newspaper articles in his lifetime as ‘Austrian’ and Sala’s death certificate states her place of birth simply as ‘Austria’. This was echoed by several of her friends from later life who told me that she spent her early years ‘in Vienna, I think’. In fact, Sala grew up more than 400 kilometres away from Vienna and the Glahs family probably never visited what is now Austria at all. They were from Chrzanow, once a busy market town whose name derives, with a memorable lack of romanticism, from the Polish word for horseradish (‘chrzan’), a local speciality. Its region was more elegantly named, Galicia, in what is now Poland’s south-west corner.

Chrzanow was a typical early twentieth-century eastern European shtetl, or Jewish village, the kind that’s so familiar from popular culture that even those who lived there describe it through the prism of art, flattening reality to something close to cliché. The very few times my grandmother referred to her childhood she talked about it in reference to Fiddler on the Roof, and the memoir of a townsperson who lived there at the same time as the Glahs siblings described its picturesque side streets as looking ‘like those in Chagall’s paintings, poor and crooked’.[1] When I visited Chrzanow in 2018 my guide compared it to the towns in stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. But Chrzanow has its own unique qualities that lift it beyond the generic. Back when the Glahses lived there it was known for its surrounding dark forests of densely packed silver birch trees where the children would hide to avoid their parents and school teachers. It also had an exceptionally pretty central square, fringed with colourful houses and shops, where people from miles away would come to do their shopping. Today, it is better known for the more dubious accolade of being only 20 kilometres from Auschwitz, so close the two towns considered themselves to be sisters.

None of the Glahs siblings ever spoke about their childhoods, and if they mentioned Poland at all they’d spit with disgust and move on, no elaboration necessary. So without personal anecdotes to act as my starting point, I turned to historical documents. If my family had been one of the famous Jewish dynasties – the Rothschilds, say, or the Freuds, or even the Halberstams, a wealthy family who lived in the region at the time – this would have sufficed. But they were not, and it did not. There aren’t many records of the individual billions of poorer lives from Europe’s past, people who leave only footprints in the sand that blow away as soon as they are buried; people who leave, at most, unidentifiable black and white photos behind them, their faces blankly solemn for the photographer’s studio, the flash bleaching them of personality; or perhaps a brief mention in a census locked away in an obscure government vault that proves they once existed and nothing more. These people are merely referred to by history as ‘the poor’, ‘the peasants’, ‘the illiterate’, even though their lives are far more revealing of the times in which they lived than those of the grander families whose lives are faithfully recorded ever after by historians.

My father mentioned that back in the 1970s my great-uncle Alex claimed to have written a memoir, which was never published, but my father couldn’t remember if he’d even ever seen it, let alone read it. If it existed at all, it had surely long been thrown away, but it seemed more likely that this was another one of Alex’s many implausible boasts, that he once wrote a memoir that somehow no one had ever seen. The idea that Alex could ever have had the patience to sit down and write an entire book seemed about as likely as me hanging out with Picasso. But one day in 2014, my father’s younger brother, Rich, emailed from Florida: he had found Alex’s memoir among my grandmother’s possessions. A week later it arrived, a bulky FedEx package, the pages untouched for at least twenty years, since my grandmother died. It was typed in French on loose-leaf paper and Alex had almost certainly dictated it to an assistant who then typed it up, because it read just as Alex talked, in his gruff, colloquial, rat-a-tat stream of consciousness: ‘I still have my Yiddish accent. I’ve never tried to correct it. I love Yiddish. It is my mother tongue. The language I spoke when I knew hunger. When I fought those degenerate Poles who wished me dead,’ he wrote on the first page. It was like he was standing in front of me in his flat in Paris, shaking his finger wildly, jabbing it at invisible opponents. (The first time I saw Joe Pesci in a movie I nearly fell off my seat in shock because, if you swap the Italian heritage for a Jewish one, Pesci looks – and talks, and swaggers and gesticulates – a lot like my great-uncle Alex did.) My father, with characteristic heroism, translated all 250 pages of Alex’s memoir for me from French to English (my French is fine but in no way is it strong enough to handle Alex’s punchy slang with occasional swoops into Yiddish). But before he sent the translation back to me, he warned me to read it with at the very least a sceptical eye: Alex’s tendency towards self-mythology was infamous, and not even those closest to him ever really believed what he said about himself. So while this memoir was an astonishing find, I opened it expecting to read a somewhat deadening litany of Alex’s triumphs. Instead, I was amazed to discover that the first thirty or so pages were a detailed and humble account of his childhood in Chrzanow, a period of his life he certainly never discussed with any of us. Instead of focusing on himself and his glories, he wrote heartfelt descriptions of his family and their struggles, and lives that had been hidden in darkness for over a century burst into the light.

Jews had lived in Chrzanow since 1590, when the town’s first Jew, a man called Yaakov, settled there.[2] Yaakov clearly had quite an impact because by the beginning of the twentieth century more than 60 per cent of the town’s inhabitants were Jewish,[3] and one of its main industries was manufacturing Judaica, such as Torah scrolls and mezuzahs.[4] The town square was bordered by 120 specifically Jewish shops, their signs written in both Hebrew and Yiddish, while the open market within was where women shopped for kosher food and headscarves. When the Glahs children were born, Chrzanow even had a Jewish mayor, Dr Zygmunt Keppler, a lawyer. From its top office to its lowest social order, Chrzanow was a Jewish town.

This was the tail end of what was a brief and relatively golden age for Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anti-Semitism certainly existed there, most infamously in the Hilsner Affair, a series of trials that took place in 1899–1900, in which a Jew, Leopold Hilsner, was accused of blood libel and spent nineteen years in prison before finally being pardoned. But Emperor Franz Joseph I had a fondness for the Jewish religion, and under his rule, Austro-Hungarian Jews emerged from the ghettos and became part of society as the emperor gave Jews equal rights, and financed Jewish institutions. This is why there seems to have been such a flourishing of Jewish productivity in the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1848 and 1916, from such people as Theodor Herzl, Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud: it’s not that this generation of Jews was uniquely talented compared with previous ones, it’s that they were granted a then unique amount of freedom.

The Chrzanovian Jews were mostly poor, but their lives were better than they had ever been or would be again. They had a friendly relationship with the Catholic Poles in the neighbouring countryside, who came into town to go to church, do their shopping and take their children to school, where they were taught alongside the Jewish children.[5] Chrzanow was situated close to the Three Emperors’ Corner, the border dividing Russia, Germany and Austria, and the city lay on the main highway that connected eastern and western Europe, meaning traders from all over came through it. So although it was a very Jewish town it was also a very international one, and the townspeople regularly mixed with many other ethnicities and nationalities. Back then, this was a wonderful financial advantage for the town’s Jews; very soon, it would become one of their greatest misfortunes.

One person who never trusted her neighbours was Chaya Rotter. Born in 1873 and the youngest of three children, she grew up in Chrzanow. Despite her lifelong closeness to multiple other countries, she spoke only Yiddish and Polish. She had little interest in mixing with anyone but her own kind.

On 13 March 1898, when she was twenty-five, she married someone who was, ostensibly, her kind in a wedding arranged by her parents. Reuben Glahs was a Jewish scholar five years younger than her and also from Chrzanow. But in truth, they were a deeply unlikely couple, in looks as much as temperament. In the very few photos that remain of her it is clear she was a large woman, solid rather than fat, with much-remarked-upon large feet and a face not even a poet could describe as beautiful. But her most extraordinary feature was her eyes. On her medical notes later in life they were described simply as ‘blue/grey’, a description that suggests either enormous self-restraint or irony on the doctor’s part. In fact, they went in two different directions at the same time, which made her look both wild and watchful.

Reuben, by contrast, was dark-haired, delicate, shorter than Chaya and strikingly handsome, like a young Adrien Brody. Unlike Chaya, he was fluent in multiple languages – German, Polish, Russian, Yiddish – and the only person in Chrzanow other than a rabbi who could read and write Hebrew. Where Chaya was tough, practical and energetic, Reuben was gentle, scholarly and slow. In his memoir, Sender – Alex as I knew him – draws frequent comparisons between his parents (invariably to his mother’s disadvantage, no matter how neutral the differences he was describing): she liked to debate furiously in the market square, washing the family’s dishes around the central well where the townswomen gathered, while he preferred to sit with his friends in the cafés, listening and nodding and drinking coffee. She was ambitious for more whereas Reuben thought you should be happy with what you have. Between them, they represented the different attitudes peasant Jews had about their place in the world at that time: should you fight for a better life than the one you were born into, or should you meekly sit back and be grateful for what you were given? Chaya and Reuben never really resolved this difference, and their marriage was less than blissful.

‘She believed herself, quite falsely, to be from a higher social class than his. So she treated my father with indifference. I saw her coolness to him. It pained me, for my father was a man of deep goodness, of noble heart and intelligence,’ Sender wrote in his memoir, in one of many passages setting out at length his mother’s flaws and his father’s perfection.

As the daughter of a poor tailor, it’s unlikely Chaya really thought of herself as being in a higher social class than anyone else, and Sender’s allegation almost certainly says more about his feelings for his mother than it does about Chaya’s feelings for Reuben. (And these feelings were also somewhat ironic, given that, in temperament and ambition, Sender was much more like his mother than his father.) But it is also likely that Reuben was a disappointment to her. When they met, he was a handsome man celebrated in the town for his intellect, but Chaya soon learned you can’t eat intellect. He worked diligently from the day of his wedding, but life only got harder for them, because of his unfailing inability to earn any money. He tried his hand at being a tailor, a glass blower, a potato picker, a translator and, finally, a Singer sewing machine travelling salesman, and each career was less successful than the last. They were desperately poor, and became more so with each child born. After an initial stillbirth in 1900, Jehuda, Chaya’s favourite, was born in 1901, followed shortly by Jakob in 1902, then Sender in 1906, one more stillbirth, then a little girl, Mindel, in 1908, who died from illness as a child, and finally Sala in 1910. For a decade, Chaya was almost continually pregnant, and hungry.

The children’s early years were both difficult and blissful. They were in a constant state of near starvation, dreaming of food that wasn’t even available to buy, not that they could have afforded it anyway. One day, a piece of cheese appeared in the window of one of the shops in the town square, beneath a glass bell. The town’s children, including Jakob and Sender, stared at it in wonder: cheese! With holes! Several centimetres thick! No one had ever seen such a marvel, and they watched, longingly, as one of the wealthy Chrzanovians from the town’s poshest street, Aleja Henryka (Boulevard Henry), went into the shop, bought it, bagged it and walked home with it, without giving any of them even a crumb. But Sender got his own back on his rich neighbours: whenever he smelled good cooking in one of their houses, he would sneak around the back, look through the kitchen window, wait for the cook to step away, then climb in, pocket a meatball and run into the forest to eat his prize. His mother, secretly pleased at her youngest son’s pragmatic approach to life, pretended not to notice the grease stains on his trousers.

They lived on a street called Kostalista in a ruin of a building, in a two-room apartment on the second floor, so dark you could barely see more than 3 feet in front of you in the daytime (Chrzanow didn’t get electricity until 1912). The windows looked out onto a barren courtyard filled with firewood for the long, bitter winters. The apartment was cold, dirty and dangerous, and the children, particularly Sender, occasionally fell out of the unprotected windows, crashing down head first onto the paving stones outside.

Despite all the hunger and near-death tumbles, life for the children was happy. Little Sala, sickly from birth with weak lungs, would stay at home with her mother during the day, contentedly cooking and sewing. Sometimes when she was allowed out, she would play with her pretty cousin, Rose Ornstein, who was about the same age as her, and the two would make dolls out of clothes-pins. The boys nominally went to the local grammar school with non-Jews in the morning and then Hebrew school in the afternoon, but only Jehuda actually attended classes. He especially liked his Catholic Polish teacher, who taught him in the morning, and the teacher liked him, even coming over to the Glahses’ home for a kosher dinner from time to time. But Jakob and especially Sender preferred to run through the streets and play football with their Ornstein cousins, Rose’s brothers, who were roughly the same ages as they were: Maurice, the eldest and therefore the leader; Josek, who was two years younger than Sender but so brave when it came to stealing food that Sender graciously considered him an equal; quiet and shy Arnold; and Alex Ornstein, the baby of the boys. (As well as Rose, there were two other Ornstein girls, Anna and Sarah.) The Ornsteins were the children of Chaya’s older sister, Hadassah, who managed to produce seven children in a decade,[6] all sweet-natured and easy-going, despite having to fight for a spot round the dining table at every meal. They lived around the corner from the Glahs family, on Aleja Henryka, named after a converted Jew,[7] because their father, Hirsch, was comparatively wealthy. But Sender never mentions feeling socially inferior to, or jealous of, his cousins in his memoir. Instead, he describes the thrill of dashing up Aleja Henryka with his brother and cousins, Sender and Josek, pocketing some meatballs on the way and heading into the birch tree woods, where there was a large sand pit, a stone quarry and a lake. They would eat Sender and Josek’s takings and hide from their parents for hours, playing make-believe and kicking a football that was a rolled-up bunch of rags.

The Glahs family kept kosher and Reuben, like all the Jewish men in Chrzanow, went to prayers every Shabbat and on holy days, walking to the Great Synagogue off the market square around the corner from their home. They were Orthodox but not ultra-Orthodox, unlike many of their fellow townspeople who dominated the local politics, in their heavy black clothes, long beards and side curls. In the very few surviving photos of the Glahs children from this period, which I found in Sala’s and Henri’s albums, the boys often wear yarmulkes, but they don’t have side curls or wear traditional clothes, and Sala is generally wearing pretty frilly dresses, while Chaya never covered her hair, as ultra-Orthodox women do. Their lives were informed by Judaism, but not controlled by it, and compared with many of their neighbours they were almost scandalously modern.

Throughout Galicia at this time there was a growing schism among the Jews regarding tradition versus progress, with the heavy-coated conservatives on one side, and the less tradition-bound Jews on the other. The latter argued for a modern approach to Judaism, influenced by the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, which emerged in the late eighteenth century and argued that Jews should maintain their secular distinctiveness, but should also take more part in the modern world, such as adopting modern dress and broader education. It looked at Judaism as an evolving cultural identity rather than a restrictive religious one. Ironically, this ideology that pushed for integration would later contribute to the rise of Zionism, partly because many Jews later realised that, no matter how much they assimilated, they were still persecuted, and therefore Jews needed a Jewish homeland.

But in Austria-Hungary in the early twentieth century, the idea of a Jewish state was so far away it might have been on the moon. Given that traditional Jews far outnumbered progressive ones in Galicia in general and Chrzanow in particular, the whole debate was ostensibly moot for Chrzanovian Jews. But Jehuda, a talented scholar from an early age who would likely have read about the Haskalah, argued for his family to adopt a more progressive approach to Judaism. In his memoir, Sender describes, with palpable retrospective awe of his big brother, how at the young age of twelve Jehuda urged his parents to be less obviously Jewish and to assimilate more with the Germans or Poles – to try to speak their language more instead of always relying on Yiddish, for example. Chaya waved her son away and continued to speak Yiddish loudly in the town square. Reuben similarly couldn’t countenance giving up what he saw as his primary identity. But as a compromise, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Jehuda to change the spelling of their surname from Glahs to the more westernised Glass – something simultaneously strong and fragile, able to withstand pressure but prone to breaking. Jews’ names as a whole in this period were unfixed, mutable – a sign it seemed to them at the time of their adaptability. But it was also an indication of the instability of their lives, and was seen as part of their ‘rootlessness’ that would soon be used against them.

All four children idolised their gentle, loving father, who raised his hand only once: to Sender (of course), when he announced at age four, on the way to synagogue, that he didn’t believe in God, and the strike was so half-hearted it felt more like a pat. Although Chaya was undoubtedly the more assertive parent, it was Reuben’s looks that were dominant. Jehuda, Jakob and Sala all inherited Reuben’s delicate, pretty appearance; Jakob in particular, who Reuben named after his beloved late father,[8] looked so similar to him the neighbours used to joke they probably had the same fingerprints. He was also the most like his father: gentle, passive and easily pushed around – Jakob skipped school only because Sender told him to do so. Jehuda, quiet and self-contained, inherited his father’s intellectual curiosity, but he was more reliable and practical. As for baby Sala, her father loved to buy pretty dresses for his little daughter, while Chaya, judging from photos, would not have recognised a pretty dress from an ugly one if it hit her in the face in the market place. But Reuben always took care over his appearance, even when he was reduced to wearing almost literal rags. The Glahs children all inherited his appreciation of aesthetics, and for the rest of their lives they dressed carefully and stylishly, a lifelong show of love for their father.

The only child who resembled, and acted, like Chaya was Sender. According to family lore Sender was ‘born fighting’, because when he came out of his mother he was silent, so the midwife slapped him. It was the last time in his life Sender lost a fight. From the age of six he was getting into scraps at school, daily. He wasn’t bothered by the blood and bruises as long as he won the battle, and he always fought until he won. Sender was born on 25 December and his mother referred to him as ‘little Jesus’, a teasing reference to his dominating personality, which was in inverse proportion to his physical size. Unlike his brothers, Sender was short, something he later put down to ‘deprivation’, although he never explained why his brothers both grew to over 6 feet, about a foot taller than him. But Sender wasn’t just a stubby little fighter – he was also a dreamer, and what he dreamed of was escape. He loved to hear his father describe places he’d read about, such as Paris, London, Venice, cities of such beauty they made the Chrzanow synagogues look like nothing, Reuben said. Sender loved his father, but he would never be like him, slaving away for no recognition. What was the point of working hard without reward? At the age of eight, Paris was far beyond his reach, so he came up with a plan to go to the closer and yet almost equally exotic Trzebina, a town 7 kilometres away, where people from Chrzanow went when they needed a dentist. Sender told his mother he had a terrible toothache and Chaya let him take the train on his own with his favourite cousin, Josek Ornstein. The town itself was something of a disappointment, but the freedom of travel thrilled Sender so much he was, for once, almost speechless. Even though it meant the boys had to suffer a hideously painful tooth extraction by the dentist, the journey was worth it. So much so, they did it again, costing them another tooth. Still worth it.

‘It was a world of superstitions, of quarrelling rabbis, quarrelling Hasidim, where thousands of Jews lived, twenty synagogues, where the air was so fresh. I sometimes felt, in lieu of food, I was nourished by the Carpathian air,’ Alex later wrote. But then the First World War started and everything that had been good about the children’s lives instantly turned very, very bad.

WHEN CHAYA WAVED her husband off to war she must have had few hopes of ever seeing him again. Reuben couldn’t even walk up Aleja Henryka without losing his breath, and that one time he gave Sender a smack he, rather than Sender, had cried – how on earth was such a man going to survive life in the Austro-Hungarian Army? But like many Jewish men, Reuben felt intense loyalty to the Emperor Franz Joseph I because of his kindness to the Jews. An educated man like Reuben would have been all too aware that it was very much in his best interest, as a Jew, to defend the emperor. So he signed up to fight pretty much as soon as his country declared war on Serbia. But there were, surely, few more unlikely soldiers than Reuben Glass.

Chaya was now, essentially, a single mother at the age of forty-one, with four children, aged thirteen, twelve, eight and four. There was no way she could look after them on her own. Her older sister, Hadassah, was busy enough with her own seven children and her brother, Samuel, was busy with his four. No, she needed a man to take charge of the household, one who would look after the family and look after her. She didn’t have to search too far to find just the one she needed.

Jehuda was only thirteen, but when his father went off to war he became the head of the household. Chaya relied on him, not even like a wife on a husband but a daughter on a father, and this was to be their dynamic for the rest of their lives. It was an obligation Jehuda quietly shouldered with enormous patience. ‘Jehuda,’ Chaya would say proudly to her children and, later, her grandchildren, ‘iz die beste.’ (Sender, on the other hand, she would describe as alternately a ‘Pshakrev’ – dog’s blood, or a Polish curse – or ‘mitzvah’, a blessing, depending on both of their moods.) Despite still being at school, Jehuda, as he later recounted in his own notes, supported the family, working for the library in the evenings and at weekends, and he tried, with minimal success, to get his brothers to go to school. He, too, started missing school: his 1916/17 school report says he missed 145 hours that year, but he still got straight As. However, as Chaya became more demanding, and life in Chrzanow became more difficult, what he really wanted was to leave. Whereas Sender looked to schemes and tooth extractions as his means of escape, Jehuda realised academia might be his ticket.

Food became increasingly scarce in Chrzanow as the war went on and the Jews were used as the scapegoats for everyone’s suffering; Polish authorities started confiscating their goods, claiming, falsely, that they were trading on the black market. The local halls in town, where the Jews had often held cultural committee meetings, were suddenly off-limits to them.[9] Both Sender and Jehuda watched all this, and began talking more openly about leaving the town. Jakob laughed at their concerns, and insisted the Jews would be safe in Chrzanow, as they always had been. Little Sala, who had Jehuda’s quietude and Jakob’s gentleness, revered her three older brothers, and agreed with whichever one seemed to be taking charge, which was generally Jehuda. But any talk of leaving Chrzanow could only be talk for now: they weren’t going anywhere until the war ended and their father returned.

However it was becoming almost impossible for them to stay. In late October 1918 there were rumours that a pogrom was being planned, organised by the Polish authorities. On 5 November 1918, six days before the end of the war, the first town in the newly liberated Poland to suffer such an attack was Chrzanow.[10]

They came at night. The townspeople heard them before they saw them, ‘a savage screaming crowd that seemed like a monster. They were attacking animals, wild beasts from the guts of hell. From their distorted snouts came cries of a horrible hatred which I found impossible to understand,’ Sender wrote. Polish men and women tore through the town, ransacking the synagogues, smashing the Jewish shop windows. The Jews ran to their homes, frantically locking the doors behind them. The Glass family hid under a bed, both Sala, who was eight, and Chaya, forty-five, clinging to seventeen-year-old Jehuda in terror. After an hour or so of listening to the frightening noises outside, twelve-year-old Sender scrambled out from under the bed and, ignoring the cries of his family, ran out to join the few Jewish men who were attempting to fight back. In the dark, he tried to make out the faces, but they were so obscured by hate and fury they looked more like wild boars than humans to him – except one. As he watched the group charge up his street he looked at the leader and realised he recognised him: it was Jehuda’s former tutor, the Christian Pole who came over for dinner occasionally. As he looked closer, he recognised some more: people who came in every Sunday to go to church, the man who sometimes gave him a bit of cheese in the market, women who had bought sewing machines from his father. He saw a well-respected judge, Court President Wierszbyicki, he saw scholars, and he saw peasants and thugs – representatives of all sectors of Polish society and here they were, beating up his friends, trying to burn down his house and kill his family.

‘Something in me died in the face of this inhuman explosion of savagery,’ he later wrote. ‘From that day, my childhood was over.’

The pogrom lasted twenty-four hours, and Sender did as much as a young boy could to fight back, tripping the men as they charged in to ransack the empty stores, kicking their horses. At one point he was slashed across the forehead with a knife and, decades later, Sala could still remember her terror when her brother stumbled through their door in the morning, blinded by blood pouring into his eyes from his deep head wound, half-crazed with adrenalin; for the rest of her life she associated Poland with that vision of violence. In one night, almost all the town’s Jews were left destitute, their money and livelihoods taken from them by their own countrymen. When the war ended six days later, few celebrated.

From then on, attacks on Jews became common in Chrzanow and in the surrounding area, especially from the so-called ‘Polish liberation army’, which emerged after Poland’s liberation at the end of the war. Its members were known as ‘the Hallerchiks’ in honour of their leader General Haller, and they would roam through Chrzanow ripping the beards off any Jews they encountered, tearing the skin and laughing at the bloodied faces. If they came across a clean-shaven Jew, they would beat him for his lack of religiosity. They justified these attacks by citing the increasingly popular theory that Jews were not loyal to Poland, but were instead Bolsheviks, plotting to overturn the government. Neither the Hallerchiks nor the Chrzanovians could have known it at the time, and certainly the Glass family didn’t, but they were at the emerging forefront of a relatively new kind of anti-Semitism, one that would shape the twentieth century, and their own lives. And it would linger, like a strange stray black cloud, over the lives of their children and grandchildren.

The theory that Jews are political destabilisers, working against whatever country they live in, is a more modern and politically inflected form of anti-Semitism than the traditional and religiously based one, which held Jews responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion. It emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a reaction against the social and economic changes in Europe, stemming from the French Revolution, when the old monarchical hierarchies were toppled, followed by the spread of industrialisation and urbanisation across the Continent. These two enormous shifts combined to create a new liberal, capitalist social order, one in which citizenship was based on civic participation and equality, as opposed to bloodline and history – forward-looking rationalism over backward-looking nationalism.[11] Thus, Jews could be seen as citizens as opposed to outsiders. Opponents of the Enlightenment, however, argued for national purity, celebrating a country’s heritage as opposed to its modern future, and during the nineteenth century there was a rise in anti-Semitism, as those who failed to benefit from the new economy blamed the Jews. In 1845 the French writer Alphonse Toussenel claimed in Les Juifs, Rois de l’Époque: ‘Protestants and Jews … have controlled public opinion in order to favour trafficking and rigging the market, blocked every defence of royalty and of the people, put the producer and the consumer at their mercy so that in France the Jew reigns and governs.’

These beliefs were validated by the infamous 1903 document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which emerged just as the Glass children were being born. It claimed that a mysterious Jewish cabal was controlling governments and the media, and even though the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was quickly exposed as a hoax, it helped to forge the dominating anti-Semitic narrative of the twentieth century. This really began to take hold after the First World War, when nationalism escalated in response to the economic devastation across the Continent, although specific takes on it differed slightly. In one version of this theory, Jews are greedy money-hoarders who control a country’s government through their connections and wealth, puppet masters pulling the strings. In the other version, the one promoted by the Hallerchiks, Jews are communist revolutionaries looking to overthrow a country’s government. But the message of both versions is the same: Jews are political disruptors working against the people and for themselves, which is just a new take on the old idea that Jews are not really citizens of the country in which they were born, so cannot be trusted. In other words, anti-Semitism becomes another form of xenophobia.

This theory has retained a tenacious hold on the popular imagination, despite everything Jews endured in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century it can be seen in, for example, the right wing’s demonisation of George Soros, the Hungarian-American philanthropist and Holocaust survivor who has been vilified by the American,[12] Hungarian[13] and British far right[14] as a suspicious manipulator plotting to control the global order and bring chaos into the lives of peaceful citizens.[fn1]

[fn2]

The campaign for Brexit – which went on near simultaneously with the vilification of Soros, and crossed left and right party lines – would probably have appealed to the Hallerchiks, with its dreamy-eyed talk about hard borders, heritage and national purity. Nigel Farage, Brexit’s most influential architect, has long talked darkly about ‘the new world order’ and argued that ‘globalists have wanted to have some form of conflict with Russia as an argument for us all to surrender our national sovereignty and give it up to a higher global level.’[15] It takes some effort not to hear the echoes of the Hallerchiks’ insistence that Jews, those citizens of nowhere, were working against Poland for some kind of greater global domination, but Farage determinedly stuck his fingers in his ears and insisted any suggestion of anti-Semitism was ‘wide of the mark’.[fn3] From ‘Bolsheviks’ in the 1920s to ‘globalists’ in the 2010s, the euphemisms for anti-Semitic and nationalist beliefs might shift over time, but the underlying stories remain remarkably constant.

CONTRARY TO EVERYONE’S EXPECTATIONS, his wife’s presumably most of all, Reuben did return from the war, but only barely. He had fought in the Second Battle of the Piave River in June 1918, in which the Italian Army crushed the Austro-Hungarian Army. This battle was the beginning of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which almost 230,000 men were killed, but Reuben survived. He was, however, badly gassed, and his lungs damaged irrevocably. Somehow, he limped through the rest of the war, further depleting whatever strength his lungs had left, and returned home, where he walked in the door and collapsed in the front room.

When Reuben realised how poor his family had become in his absence, with Sender stealing food for the family table and Sala wearing rags, he forced himself to return to work. Reuben didn’t have a pension from the army, and the family desperately needed money, so he went back to hawking Singer sewing machines around the countryside. But there are few worse careers for a man with broken lungs than that of travelling salesman, schlepping through sooty towns on dirty trains in cold nights.

‘My father was very, very ill, and there was no medicine for him. As if we could afford medicine. He had to return to work, to continue his endless travels as a sewing machine salesman for a miserable little salary. Great sadness infected our home,’ Sender wrote.

Reuben did not last long at his job, but the sadness did. One night Reuben came back to the apartment after another trip, went to bed and never got up again. For the next few years he lay there, sick, in horrendous pain, racked with a violent cough that seemed to rip his lungs apart with every hack.

After the war the Glass family were still in their old home but in an utterly unfamiliar land. The deeply anti-Semitic National-Democratic (ND) Party was on the rise in Poland. At the Versailles Conference in January 1919 the Polish delegation, co-led by Roman Dmowski, co-founder of the ND Party, fought unsuccessfully against signing the minorities protections section of the Treaty of Versailles. Dmowski and the Polish politicians complained that it suggested Poland and the Polish people were oppressors as opposed to victims, which was how they saw themselves, and not without some merit. Poland was decimated after the war, after German, Austrian and Russian troops had marched back and forth across it, destroying railways and agriculture, and the ensuing poverty led people to look for targets to blame. Dmowski insisted, in familiar rhetoric, that ‘international Jewry’ was plotting Poland’s destruction, and the Catholic Polish media repeatedly and openly associated Jews with evil.[16] This did little to stem the attacks against Jews in Poland.

The Ornstein cousins had already left Chrzanow for Paris, and after the first pogrom the Glass family knew they had to go too. Like a strikingly high number of Jews in the early 1920s, Jehuda went to Prague to attend university,[17] which the family somehow managed to pay for. So Jakob was the first of the family to go to Paris, in 1920 when he was eighteen years old, followed shortly thereafter by fourteen-year-old Sender. But Chaya and Sala stayed behind with Reuben, as he could not survive the journey, and the three of them alone endured the terror of multiple pogroms and increasing anti-Semitism. Finally, in 1925, after years of pain, Reuben died.

For the rest of their lives, the Glass children referred to Reuben’s death as one of their most formative and traumatic experiences, despite all they later endured. Jakob and Sender were both living in Paris at this point, and the former wept for the only adult he knew who never berated him for his deficiencies, while Sender, who idolised his father, both despite and because he was so different from him, raged with fury against his death. Fifty years later, he dedicated his memoir to his father, ‘the man I loved most in my life’. Sala, still then only fourteen, cried for her father who had made her feel pretty and loved and safe. Chaya leaned on Jehuda more heavily than ever, demanding he come home from university to help her.

Jehuda didn’t cry when his father died. Instead he tucked his grief behind his implacable exterior, like the creased photo of his father that he hid inside his stiff wallet for the rest of his life. Almost thirty years after Jehuda died, I found that wallet, in a storage box in the basement of his daughter Danièle’s building. It had slipped into the lining of an old suitcase and I happened to discover it by accident. I pulled it out and looked through it, hoping to find something that would reveal a little of Jehuda’s later life: receipts, perhaps, or scrawled notes. But the only thing in it was the photo of Reuben, a century old by that point, the only memory Jehuda kept on him at all times, until he, too, was a memory.

Almost as soon as Reuben died, Chaya and Sala went to Paris. The world in which the Glass children had grown up, the eastern European Jewish shtetl, based on community but also dependent on peaceful interactions with outsiders, was dying. Like Reuben, it had no place in this harshly emerging modern era. So both he and it were buried in Chrzanow’s Jewish cemetery, filled with other Jews whose families, if they were lucky, were forging new lives across Europe, leaving behind neglected gravestones and much more.

None of the Glasses ever returned to Chrzanow, except one, once. In the 1970s, Sender – now known as Alex – visited Poland on a trip organised by some of his fellow veterans from the Foreign Legion. He went, very reluctantly, back to a country he associated only with death, pogroms and hunger. But he went because he was interested to see how many Jews were left where he grew up, and how they were living. What he saw devastated him. The town, which he remembered as surrounded by forests and countryside, was, he wrote, now ‘an open, heavily polluted field’. The only things he recognised were ‘the brutish mugs’ of the Polish people he saw in the market place – otherwise, everything from his childhood was gone: his home, the synagogues, the Jews.

Chrzanow fell into German hands almost the day the Second World War was declared, 1 September 1939. This was not a surprise to the Chrzanovians: the month before they’d watched the long caravans of desperate people marching down the long highway between Katowice and Krakow, which ran through Chrzanow, as civilians who lived near the German and Polish borders fled into the countryside for safety. Adolf Hitler had been pushing the myth that communism was a Jewish plot for almost a decade, borrowing the story from anti-Semitic nationalist movements in various countries, including Poland. Meanwhile, the theory that Polish Jews were working for the Soviets, and had even been responsible for the Great Purge of 1936–8 in which up to 1.2 million people were killed in Russia, had become so widespread it was generally assumed to be fact, and Polish nationalists referred to Jews collectively as traitors.[18] Chrzanow was infused with panic, and the wealthier and cannier sent their female relatives, children and valuables out of the city to safety.[19] But many did not. Because so many of the town’s Jews knew and did business with the Germans, they refused to believe that the Germans would actually hurt them, their long-time neighbours, friends and colleagues.[20] For neither the first nor the last time, the Jews were over-optimistic about the benevolence of outsiders. On 4 September 1939 the Nazis entered the city and immediately began to terrorise the Jews. But as much as the actions of their neighbours and former colleagues shocked them, an even bigger surprise to the Chrzanovian Jews was how keen their countrymen, the Poles, were to betray them.

‘They were the ones who pointed out the Jews to the German soldiers, who couldn’t tell the difference between Jews and Poles. They didn’t know any German but with sign language they pointed out “Jude!”’, one resident of the town later recalled.[21] More than 15,000 Jews – almost the entirety of the town’s Jewish population[22] – died in the Holocaust, rounded up and sent just down the road to their sister town, which many of them would have visited before, where they were murdered.[23] Ironically, the pogroms that had so terrified my grandmother and her family had actually saved their lives, because they propelled the family out of Poland before the 1930s. Had they stayed, they almost certainly all would have been killed.

I WENT TO CHRZANOW in the spring of 2018, forty years after Alex visited, almost exactly a hundred years after the Glass family started to leave. My father travelled there with me, as did our relative Anne-Laurence Goldberg, Anna Ornstein’s granddaughter. Chrzanow itself wasn’t quite as grim as when Alex had visited, when it was still under Communist rule: there were typical eastern European tower blocks around the outside, but also pretty streets in the centre, bordered with houses freshly painted in dusky pinks, yellows and greens, as they had been back when the Glasses lived there. Yet it still feels like a town from which something’s been sucked out, and what’s been sucked out are the Jews. In 1920 Jews represented 55.5 per cent of the town’s population. Today, they officially represent less than 1 per cent, although our guide admitted that number was more likely to be closer to zero.

My father, Anne-Laurence and I walked around the town, retracing the stories Alex told in his memoir. The square, where Chaya used to wash the dishes and do the shopping, is still there, but all the Jewish shops that bordered the square have gone. Of the town’s twenty synagogues not a single one remains. The Great Synagogue, where the Glasses prayed, was destroyed in the 1970s to make room for a car park. All that remains of it is a broken concrete wall, heavily graffitied. In fact, the Jewish cemetery where Reuben is buried, which somehow survived the war, is pretty much the only sign that Jews ever lived there at all. He lies in a quiet corner, shaded by the former Galician forest where his children once ran. He is near his daughter Mindel, who died as a child; his father Jakob’s gravestone lies on the other side of the cemetery, next to the great family tomb for the wealthy Halberstam family, like a humble sentryman keeping guard. Reuben was not one for making public statements in life, but in death the deeply carved Hebrew letters on his tombstone act as an uncharacteristically defiant show of Chrzanow’s Jewish legacy.

The week before my father and I booked our tickets to go to Chrzanow in 2018, the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, signed into law an anti-defamation bill, making it illegal to attribute responsibility or complicity for the Holocaust to the Polish state.[24] This law, President Duda said in a national broadcast, ‘protects Polish interests … our dignity, the historical truth … so that we are not slandered as a state and as a nation’. In a century-spanning echo of Dmowski’s complaint in 1919, Duda objected to the idea that Poland was ever an oppressor. Instead, he said, stories about Poland during the Second World War should focus on Poland’s suffering and glory.

This bill was not a surprise to anyone who had followed the Law and Justice Party since they came to power. In 2016 President Duda threatened to take away a national honour from Jan Tomasz Gross, an American citizen born in Poland and one of the world’s experts on the Holocaust.[25] Gross wrote in an essay that the Poles ‘killed more Jews than [the] Germans [did]’, a claim other historians have backed up as correct. Yet Duda insisted this was ‘an attempt to destroy Poland’s good name’, and while in Poland Gross was hauled in for five hours of questioning.[26]

No doubt, Poland endured one of the most brutal occupations of any country invaded by the Germans, and the Poles, who the Nazis considered to be Untermenschen (inferiors), suffered horrifically. Yet it is also true that part of the reason 90 per cent of Poland’s Jews were killed during the war, one of the highest percentages in Europe, is that they were denounced, hunted and killed by the Poles themselves, before, during and even after the war. Just one year after the end of the Second World War, on 4 July 1946, soldiers and civilians led an attack on the Jews in the Polish town of Kielce, killing more than forty Jews. They had survived the Holocaust, returned to what was in many cases their homeland, only to be then killed by their fellow citizens. After what became known as the Kielce pogrom, many of the surviving Polish Jews left the country and few have ever returned. Before the Second World War, more than 3 million Jews lived in Poland, the biggest Jewish population in Europe; today it is estimated to be about ten thousand. By comparison, more than fifteen thousand Jews live in Miami Beach and more than fifty thousand Jews live in the north London borough of Barnet.

Poland had been a deeply anti-Semitic country long before the Nazis turned up, as the Glass family knew well. So while there certainly were brave Polish individuals who tried to help the Jews during the war, they were very much the exception.[27] Even after the war, many in eastern Europe, including Poland, continued to refer to Jews as Bolsheviks, suggesting that what happened to them was in some way their fault, and certainly not Poland’s. That mentality still exists today: by outlawing suggestions of Polish complicity President Duda and his Law and Justice Party are trying to create ‘a narrative of heroic Polish victimhood’, the New York Times said,[28] one that absolved them of any wrongdoing in the Second World War. An official to the President said any Jews who criticised the law, who claimed that Polish anti-Semitism helped to enable the Holocaust happening on Polish land, were merely ‘ashamed [that] many Jews engaged in collaboration during the war’.[29]

Just down the road from Chrzanow is the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial. While my father, Anne-Laurence and I were in Chrzanow, the nationalist and pro-government Polish media was accusing the museum of downplaying the deaths of Poles in the camp and focusing instead on what was described as ‘foreign narratives’ – in other words, the Jewish stories.

‘Foreign, and not Polish narratives reign at Auschwitz. Time for it to stop,’ wrote Barbara Nowack, a former local councillor for the Law and Justice Party. The home of at least one guide at the site was vandalised in March 2018, with someone spray-painting ‘Poland for the Poles’ across the outside alongside a Star of David equated with a swastika.[30]

None of this would have surprised the Glasses. It did, however, surprise me. Because I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau before visiting Chrzanow with my father and Anne-Laurence (whose grandparents, Anna and Samuel Goldberg, had been killed there), what struck me was how much emphasis was placed on the Polish victims. Seventy-five thousand non-Jewish Poles were killed in Auschwitz, which is shocking, but so were the 1.1 million Jews, and looking around at the exhibitions, signs and tours it felt like the memorial was suggesting some kind of equivalence between the Polish and Jewish suffering in the camp. There is even a gift shop – yes, a gift shop – in the car park outside, run by the local municipality, which sells Polish tourist tat. Because nothing makes one more desirous of buying an ‘I Heart Poland’ coffee mug than a trip to Auschwitz. ‘An Auschwitz gift shop’ is surely the ultimate Jewish joke, and its intention is clear: Auschwitz, it is saying, is about Polish victimhood and triumph. The Jews were a side issue.

‘In all Holocaust sites there is a tendency to emphasise the nation’s suffering and German culpability,’ Martin Winstone from the Holocaust Educational Trust told me in 2018:

Auschwitz was one of the very few concentration camps where non-Jewish Poles were killed, so it’s not surprising Polish suffering is emphasised there – although, of course, far more Jews were killed there. But so much depends on political and social climates. Even just five years ago people would have said Poland was being really honest about its history. But with this government in power they are trying to limit discussions of Polish culpability, and these efforts aren’t actually aimed at the international community, but at the people in Poland – teachers, academics – who are trying to tell the true story. A huge amount of Polish identity is based on the idea that Poles were victims of the German occupation, but that doesn’t mean some of them didn’t also perpetrate it. Every country wants to have heroic narratives of the war, and what this all shows is how vulnerable historical truth is.

Back in Chrzanow, we found the building where Anne-Laurence’s grandmother, Anna Ornstein, and the rest of the Ornstein cousins lived on Aleja Henrika. It was large and imposing, with fretted ironwork around the balconies, preventing any children from rolling off. It was painfully different from the crumbling semi-death trap where the Glasses lived, as described in Alex’s memoir. We eventually found the Glass family’s street, after figuring out it had been renamed from Kostalista to Lipstada. Their house had long since been torn down, which wasn’t a surprise – I hardly expected a condemned building from a century ago to still be standing. But what I saw around the corner made me stop and stare. There, on the side of a building just behind where the Glasses once lived, was fresh graffiti: ‘Anty Jude’. This was a tag from a fan of the Wisla football team, whose supporters refer to themselves as the ‘Anty Jude Gang’, in opposition to the Widzew team, which is associated with the Jewish community in the way Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is in England. The Anty Jude label is defended by supporters as mere larky banter – only the most po-faced seeker of victim status could confuse it with real anti-Semitism, they say. At a Polish league game in 2013 between Wisla and Widzew, there were chants of ‘Move on, Jews! Your home is at Auschwitz! Send you to the gas chamber!’ A Polish municipal prosecutor decided these were not criminal offences.[31]

Not even being less than 20 kilometres from Auschwitz made this graffiti artist rethink leaving this tag. If anything, it may have encouraged them. My father winced when he saw it and looked away, but I think the Glasses would have appreciated the aptness of seeing this on their neighbour’s building in 2018. Almost a century after they left everything they had and knew to go to France, their old town – their old country – was still very much vindicating their decision.

Sala in France, 1929.

2
THE GLASS SIBLINGS – Immigration
Paris, 1920s–early 1930s

OF COURSE, to the Glasses, their decision to move from Poland to Paris in 1920 felt utterly personal: their home town was suddenly under threat from violent pogroms; the Ornstein cousins were already in Paris so could help them once they arrived; Paris wasn’t unreachably far from Poland. This random set of circumstances, it seemed to them, happened to blow them towards the French capital.

But as is often the case with events that feel specific to us in the moment, the Glasses’ move was wholly typical of both their time and their demographic. Between 1880 and 1925, 3.5 million Jews left central and eastern Europe and 100,000 of them went to France,[1],[2] most for exactly the same reasons as the Glasses: they were fleeing the pogroms, and they knew people in Paris. Between 1900 and 1935, the number of Jews in France tripled,[3] and by the end of that decade Paris had the third largest Jewish community in the world, surpassed only by New York and Warsaw.[4] So not only were Jews likely to feel at home there, but they were also likely to have relatives there who would help them settle in, as the Glasses did. New York was too far away for many eastern European immigrants, and Warsaw too close to the danger from which they were fleeing, so Paris was the logical third option. Even more appealing for immigrants in the 1920s was that, at this point, France – unlike the United States or the United Kingdom[5] – had never imposed an anti-immigration statute that capped the number of (primarily Jewish) immigrants allowed in. Instead the country was known as une terre d’asile (a nation of asylum), and as a result, by the late 1930s, Paris had a Jewish population of 150,000, of whom 90,000 were immigrants from eastern Europe, including 50,000 Poles.[6] France, these Jews imagined, would be their salvation, away from pogroms and rampaging peasants. There was even a popular Yiddish phrase suggesting as much: lebn vi Got in Frankrykk[7] (live like a king in France). Although seeing as there was a similar phrase about Poland, describing it as a Pardisus Judeorum (a Jewish paradise),[8] the Polish Jews at least ought to have known better than to put too much faith in old Yiddish sayings.

France’s appeal to fleeing Jewish immigrants went deeper than mere pragmatic considerations. In 1791 it became the first country in western Europe to liberate Jews[9] and so was associated in many Jews’ minds with liberalism and tolerance. Immigrant Jews weren’t especially bothered by the Dreyfus Affair,[10] the notorious case in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was accused of passing confidential French military documents to the Germans and was unanimously found guilty by seven judges of treason in 1894. He was finally exonerated in 1906 after another (non-Jewish) Frenchman, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was proven to be the culprit. The French Army had mounted a massive cover-up to obscure Dreyfus’s innocence and, more than a century on, the case remains one of the most notorious examples of anti-Semitism. Many eastern European Jews at the time, however, saw it differently. At least, they reasoned, in France these arguments happen in the public sphere, an improvement on what they saw in their own countries, where their relatives and friends were lynched and dumped.

‘We saw the Dreyfus Affair as part of history, and touching only on a part of the populace, the military. It seemed to us a sort of literary anti-Semitism, the product of old, reactionary fanatics. What had really touched us was the Beilis Affair. For us poor Jews, the Beilis Affair had a terrifying resonance when the pogroms began, because it seemed like it could happen anywhere,’ Sender wrote, referring to the vehemently anti-Semitic 1911 case in Russia, in which Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Hasidic Jew, was falsely accused of killing a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy, and the murder was associated with the blood libel. West, in other words, was infinitely preferable to east.

And in the main, France was happy to have the Jews. After the Dreyfus Affair, which exposed systemic French anti-Semitism under the shaming bright lights of publicity, anti-Jewish feelings subsided.[11] The anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole, which once had a circulation of over 300,000 copies, folded, and even Maurice Barrès, one of the leaders of the anti-Semitic right at the end of the nineteenth century and during the Dreyfus Affair, wrote in his 1917 essay, ‘Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France’, that Jews should be considered one of France’s ‘spiritual families’ because of their courage during the war.

But there was a practical element to France’s embrace of Jews as well as a moral one: 1.4 million Frenchmen died in the First World War, and the country desperately needed workers. So much so that in 1927 the Naturalisation Act was introduced, reducing the requirement for naturalisation from ten years to three, making it even easier, and quicker, to get immigrants into jobs.[12] The eastern European immigrants were shunted into industries that were seen as Jewish, such as the textile and garment trades, furniture-making and watch and jewellery repair. Most of these were based in or near the Marais, the Parisian quarter that was once chic but had become something of a ghetto. Just a few years before the Glass family arrived, New York’s Yiddish newspaper Der Forverts ran an article about the Marais: ‘The alleys are frightfully dirty, the houses mostly old ruins … Without exaggeration one can find from twelve to fifteen persons living in two small rooms … The largest and best room serves as the atelier; one eats where one can and sleeps in a dark hole without a window.’[13] This was where many immigrants settled, and it was so popular with Jewish immigrants it became known as the ‘Pletzl’ – Yiddish for ‘little place’.

Jakob was the first to arrive in Paris, when he was just eighteen years old, and he adhered so faithfully to the trends of his demographic that the outlines of his story at times veer towards textbook. He rented a small flat near the Pletzl, on rue de Cléry, because it was close to his Ornstein cousins, and he got work as a furrier in the Pletzl, not because he knew anything about fur but because his cousin Josek, the second-oldest Ornstein, worked in the fur trade and helped him find a job. Jakob spent his days in the Pletzl, tending to animal skins in a darkened room, and he loved the simplicity of his work and life. In the Pletzl he could live as he had always done, surrounded by Poles and Yiddish speakers. If he never left his neighbourhoods, and there was rarely any need to do so, he barely had to remember he had left Chrzanow at all.

Sender, however, felt very differently. The fourteen-year-old arrived not long after Jakob, on a train full of other eastern European immigrants. His clothes and speech immediately marked him as a foreigner, so he was shunned by the French commuters around him as he walked through the train station. It was there that he saw and learned his first French word: ‘sortie’ (exit). Following Jakob’s instructions, he caught a bus from the station and stared out of the window in astonishment at the beauty of Paris. His occasional trips to the dentist in Trzebina hadn’t prepared him for anything like this. He stared out of the bus window at the elegant architecture and even more elegant people in gleeful amazement. When he arrived at his new neighbourhood next to the Pletzl his heart sank into his shoes. It looked to him like Jakob had found the one ugly part of Paris, and was making him live there. He walked through the dirty and noisy streets looking for rue de Cléry, and when he saw Jakob’s poky flat, he understood how little Jakob had changed his life, whereas Sender had come here to change everything. He also grasped that he was expected to become a traditional immigrant Jewish tailor like his brother and beloved Ornstein cousins, but he knew that he would never, ever do that. He loved few people more than Jakob, and no one more than his father, but he looked at their lives of drudgery, and although there was a part of him that admired their humility, he knew life had more to offer, and he would grab it. Jakob and Reuben expected nothing from life; Sender demanded everything. He had not come all this way to continue living like a Polish peasant. Despite having had such a circumscribed childhood, Sender’s ambitions were boundless, and from what his father had always told him, and what he had seen on his bus ride to the Pletzl, he knew Paris could provide what he sought. In his memoir he wrote:

In Paris there was such gaiety. It dazzled the eyes. In Paris, on the terraces of the great restaurants, people drank wine and were happy. It was the image of happiness on earth. ‘This life is impossible. It must be better, elsewhere’: these words turned in my head during the long Chrzanow nights. So, it was true. Life could be marvellous. Paris is where I was reborn.

After rejecting the life of a tailor, spending his days sitting on a bench in the Pletzl, Sender decided to be a couturier. He wanted his name above the door of his own salon, like those he saw on his daily walks around the city, when he eagerly escaped the Pletzl to explore the ritzier neighbourhoods around rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and Place Vendôme. Lanvin, Schiaparelli, Vionnet, Patou: that’s who he wanted to be like, not just another Jewish tailor. There was, however, a small problem: he didn’t even know how to sew on a button.

Not for a second did Sender see this as a possible impediment to becoming a world-famous fashion designer. If anything, that it was such an unlikely path for him to choose only made him more determined to succeed. So, undaunted, he found a job as an apprentice at a garment workshop where he learned how to cut, sew and drape while working twenty-four-hour shifts. And when he finished a shift he came back to his and Jakob’s flat and practised sewing for another twenty-four hours. It infuriated him that he was so bad at it, and his anger drove him to work harder: he wouldn’t, he explained to his bemused brother, stop until he became good. His cousin Josek was one of the few who understood his ambitions, because, like Sender, Josek was smart, but he considered himself too smart to take such an absurd risk as trying to be a couturier, whereas Sender felt he was too smart not to.

‘Life,’ he wrote, ‘was not going to pass me by any more.’

Over the next few years, while Sala and Chaya stayed in Chrzanow with Reuben, and Jehuda continued his studies in Prague, Jakob worked quietly as a furrier in the Pletzl and Sender, then in his mid-teens, threw himself into couture and Paris life. He slogged his way through the workshops and got apprenticeships with small couturiers around the Saint-Martin neighbourhood, making a name for himself as an exceptionally hard worker and a perfectionist.

Couture might seem like an odd career path for one who used to relax by getting into brawls in the streets of Chrzanow. But what fashion meant to Sender was beauty, and beauty represented the opposite of Poland. It was a bulwark against the suffering he saw his father endure. He wrote:

In my little Chrzanow world, there were no paintings at all, no beauty. But I always felt a growing hunger inside me for it, and I arrived in Paris famished for this beauty. Different from other immigrants who came to France mainly to earn money, I wished to educate myself constantly, to continue the Jewish traditions but also to open myself to French culture. I participated in the life of the country. Everywhere I went something new was happening, and I hurried to make up for lost time. I wanted to know everything, to devour life like a man eating a big chunk of meat.

While he spent his weekdays learning how to make beautiful clothes, he spent his weekends and nights learning how to make a beautiful world. Jakob liked to hang out at the cafés in the Pletzl with his cousins and other Jewish tailors. Sender was not averse to cafés, but he wanted to find a new life, not cling to his old one. Not long after he arrived in Paris he met Marc Chagall, who was already an established artist, at Café Koretz, a small hangout for Yiddish speakers in the Pletzl with only five or six tables. Over dishes of stuffed carp, cake and tea, the two would talk about politics and share memories of their home towns that still haunted them both. It was through Chagall that Sender became aware of modern art and artists, and he was soon spending his weekends at the Musée du Luxembourg, then Paris’s only museum of modern art. When Sender invited his brother to come with him at weekends to look at the Cézannes and Monets, or to look in the windows of the French couturiers on the Grands Boulevards, Jakob would wave him away.

‘We don’t know anything about painting, why would we spend our weekends doing that? Let’s have fun instead,’ he’d say. And when Sender stormed off towards the Louvre on his own, Jakob would head to his local café to see his friends, all of whom were also Jewish immigrants, to read the Yiddish newspapers, to drink, to joke, to do nothing.

So Sender looked elsewhere for like-minded companionship. Through Chagall, he became increasingly close to artists who, like Chagall and himself, were Jewish refugees, such as Jules Pascin and Moïse Kisling, known to his friends as Kiki. These three artists – Chagall, Pascin and Kisling – were part of the École de Paris, a term coined by a critic to refer to the sudden influx of immigrant artists who had all, for reasons very similar to Sender, washed up in Paris in the interwar period. (‘École de France’, on the other hand, referred to French-born artists, who tended to be more traditional stylistically and they somewhat resented the attention these new avant-garde foreigners got from the art critics.) They were all several decades older than Sender, and it’s likely that Sender, the fatherless teenager in a new strange land, saw them as paternal figures. Chagall would refer to Sender fondly as ‘our youngest friend’ and if he was ever away too long from the cafés, because he was working so hard, one of the artists would come looking for him, bringing a cup of soup in case he was ill. For the first time in Sender’s life, he had friends.

By 1925, Sender had earned enough from his apprenticeships to be able to send money for Chaya and Sala to come and join them in Paris after Reuben died. They initially lived with him and Jakob on rue de Cléry, four people crowded into a studio flat barely big enough for one. Like Jakob, Chaya loved the Pletzl for its reassuring familiarity. The local bakeries sold challah, not croissants. The Polish synagogue was only a few yards away. Chaya had managed to move halfway across Europe without changing her daily life a jot, and in all the years she lived in Paris she never learned a single French word. Chaya had never trusted outsiders anyway, and after her experiences in Chrzanow, she believed if the French didn’t see her they wouldn’t hurt her.

But while Chaya and Jakob felt similarly about the Pletzl, Sala shared Sender’s feelings about Paris. After living for so long in fear in pogrom-torn Chrzanow, its beauty amazed her, and although as a sickly teenage girl she was largely stuck inside, she longed to explore the city like her older brother. Sender had never paid much attention to his sister before, but when she arrived in Paris she was a fifteen-year-old beauty who looked, Sender realised, not unlike the models in the fashion magazines he had taken to buying whenever he had spare change. She had wavy dark hair, high cheekbones and large round eyes, and her family later said they seemed to get bigger in Paris as she tried to take in everything around her. Of equal interest to Sender was the fact that she idolised him, making her his only sibling who took his dreams seriously. When Sender had a day off, and if Sala was feeling well enough, he would take her with him around the city, and the two Polish teenagers walked together down the Grands Boulevards, staring through the big windows of the fashion salons, looking at the elegant French ladies choosing fabrics while the couturiers bowed and flattered them. Decades later Sala would describe those walks to her family, still audibly thrilling at the memory of seeing such elegance, and being with her brother.

Sender also took her to the museums and introduced her to art, which she had never seen before in her life. Sometimes he would also take some of his Ornstein cousins, in particular his favourites Josek and Alex, one tough like him and the other sweet-tempered and easy-going. (All his life, Sender was drawn to two types of men: either tough competitive men like himself and Josek, or calm and gentle ones like Jehuda, Jakob and Alex Ornstein.) He showed them his favourite designers and artworks, because the parts of Sender’s character that he felt he had to suppress to get ahead in the world he expressed through art and fashion. He told his sister that he loved the Impressionists because ‘of their femininity’. When they went to the Musée du Luxembourg together Sender would stand for hours in front of a Monet painting.

‘This fills my soul with delight,’ he told her.

Sala’s soul was also delighted by Paris, with all its beauty, art and fashion. Her weak lungs, however, suffered wretchedly in the dirty Pletzl. Jehuda arrived in Paris later that year after a brief period in Danzig, following his studies in Prague, where he worked as an engineer to make some money, and when he heard his sister’s chronic cough he took charge. For the next half-decade Sala was in and out of sanatoriums that her eldest brother found for her up in the mountains, physically recovering but mentally rotting in lonely solitude, time and life drifting away. They were isolating and disorienting, these giant white buildings up in the sky, so far from her new home and even further from her old home, too far for any of her family to come and visit her. They did, however, make her better and the doctors finally put a name to her suffering: she had pleurisy, an inflammation of the tissue layers in the lungs, and although they couldn’t cure it yet, the rest and clean air began to soothe the pains in her chest she’d had so long she assumed they were simply part of the human condition. Until, one day, they lifted, and it was like clearing dirt from her eyes. Life didn’t have to be obscured by pain after all.

Jehuda’s feelings about Paris were much closer to Sala’s and Sender’s than Chaya’s and Jakob’s: as soon as he arrived he knew this city was home, because it didn’t feel like his old home. The elegance of the people and architecture, the delicious food, even the waiters with their short vests and white aprons looked impossibly chic to him as they carried thin-stemmed glasses of wine to their patrons: it was all so different from the unrelenting drabness of Chrzanow, and he loved it all.

Jehuda was known in his family as the intellectual one, but he was also deeply aesthetic. He’d always loved western culture, especially the art, and as a student in Krakow he proudly if somewhat eccentrically wore a chimney sweep’s hat, as tall as a stovepipe, much to his brother Jakob’s bemusement and his brother Sender’s admiration. Fashion allowed this shy young man to carve out some self-expression, and it wasn’t until he got to France that this expression found its shape and flow.

Initially he stayed in a tiny one-room flat near the rest of his family on a loud and busy main road. Almost as soon as he arrived, he told his siblings they should all change their Polish names to the French equivalents, just as he once urged his father to change their surname. Jehuda understood, as he had known in Chrzanow, that shucking off their heavy Yiddish and Polish labels would only ease his and his siblings’ paths in life, and this was when the young people born Jehuda, Jakob, Sender and Sala Glahs became Jules, Jacques, Alex and Sara Glass. Unfortunately, Jehuda hated the westernised version of his name, ‘Jules’, as he thought it pretentious, a quality he abhorred above all. So he found what felt like a legitimate way around this rule of his own making by adopting the French version of his middle name, Henoch. He could be who he wanted, but within certain self-imposed parameters, and so he became Henri. It sounded respectable and French to him and he liked it so much he instantly made the change official: in 1926 he received a certificate from l’Administration Supérieure Confessionnelle Israélite de la Paroisse stating ‘Jehuda Henoch Glass shall hereon be known as Jules Henri Glass.’

And yet, despite the Glass siblings’ eager embrace of their French names, they did not apply for naturalisation, even after the Naturalisation Act the following year in 1927. In retrospect, this seems like a baffling decision, and yet it was one many foreign Jews took. Like a lot of immigrants, the Glass family arrived in Paris with a wariness of local officials and a suspicion of registering one’s presence with the state. After all, being known as Jewish hadn’t helped them much back in Poland. Of more immediate concern, applying for naturalisation involved a large amount of time-consuming paperwork and the assistance of a lawyer. To the cash-strapped Glass family, whose ability to read French was, at this point, patchy at best, this made it an impossibility. And so they opted to remain unnaturalised, relying on work permits and the goodwill of France to immigrants. There was no reason to doubt the latter would change, they believed. The French had let them in, after all.

However, being unnaturalised meant the Glasses couldn’t vote, which probably didn’t bother Henri much, and they had to carry identity cards, which very much did. As well as restricting immigrants to certain geographical areas, identity cards determined what professions they could pursue. Despite his degrees, Henri didn’t have many career choices when he arrived in Paris, as the Ornstein cousins had warned him: Josek Ornstein was celebrated for his intellect back in Poland, but in Paris he worked as a furrier. Henri, the trained engineer, similarly learned to shrink his ambition and shelve his dreams, going into business with his brother Jacques. Neither of the two older Glass brothers were natural businessmen, let alone tailors, as was soon to become all too clear, but Henri managed to save up just enough to get his own apartment over the river, far from his family and among the native Parisians in the 7th arrondissement.

Eventually, all the Glasses found their own apartments. Alex was driven out of the apartment he’d shared for years with Jacques by his mother. Alex and Chaya, as alike in temperament as they were in looks, were utterly impossible flatmates and they fought viciously, usually about what Chaya deemed to be Alex’s ‘dissolute’ lifestyle of staying out late and drinking alcohol.

‘Get your own place if you want to live like this,’ she said, according to Alex’s memoir.

‘This IS my place!’ he snapped back. But Alex had had enough of living with his family, so he simply walked out of the Marais, bought a newspaper, looked in the property section and went to the first available apartment that he could afford, around the corner from the Gare de l’Est. He gave the landlord forged identity papers, so he wouldn’t know how young he was, and because Alex didn’t have enough money for a bank account, he got his more well-known employers and customers to provide references, hoping their names would dazzle the landlord. He was right. Alex was still only a teenager, and he looked at least four years younger because he was so small, but he already knew how to game the system.

Chaya moved out soon, too, to a little flat on rue des Rosiers, the central spine of the Pletzl, and Sara lived with her in between stays in the sanatoriums. Back then, rue des Rosiers was filthy and almost intolerably noisy (a terrible place, in other words, for someone to stay while recovering from pleurisy). Today it is a very chic street, partially pedestrianised so visitors can shop that little bit more easily at boutiques such as Lululemon and Annick Goutal. Few signs of the street’s earlier Jewish life still exist – there is a Jewish bakery at one end, although, alone on this street of high-end shops, it feels more like a heritage tourist site than something connected to the life of the area – fancy dress among the fancy dresses. A more revealing remnant of the past can be found next door at 16 rue des Rosiers: a plaque commemorating the memory of five former inhabitants, including a twelve-year-old (Rosette Lewkowicz), a two-year-old (Viktor Wajncwaig) and a one-month-old (Paulette Wajncwaig) who were killed in the Holocaust ‘par les Nazis, parce que nés juifs. Avec la complicité active du gouvernement de Vichy’ (by the Nazis, because they were born Jewish. With the active complicity of the Vichy government).

Sara and Chaya in their apartment on rue des Rosiers.

The Glass brothers could now focus on building their lives in Paris. For Alex, this meant becoming a couturier. He lived on his own but managed to save up enough money so that after finishing his apprenticeships, instead of working for a designer as most other aspiring young couturiers did, he decided to achieve his dream: at the age of only twenty, he opened his first couture salon. He called it Alex Maguy instead of Alex Glass, and he gave varying reasons for this over the years. In his memoir he says Maguy ‘sounded more Parisian’; he once told my father, Ronald, it was to make him sound like a typical Frenchman. He also claimed it was in honour of a friend’s wife, who was called Marguerite. And maybe those reasons are true. But perhaps Alex was also making a further break between his new life as a Parisian couturier and his old life as a Polish peasant, and by taking an entirely new surname he was putting a definitive division between his new, independent life and the emotionally enmeshed one he had with his family. Henri was not the only sibling to understand that changing one’s name was an effective way to break from the past.

Alex’s salon was small and basic, a two-room former office space, a far cry from the plush silk-strewn luxury he and Sara had seen through the windows of Lanvin and Patou. But the details were irrelevant because he had done it: he had his own couture company, at 29 rue d’Argenteuil, near the Palais-Royal and just around the corner from the great couturiers. He had never even been allowed in any of their showrooms, having been relegated to the back rooms with the other trainees and workers, but now he had one of his own. It was, by any measure, an incredible achievement, especially for a designer who was hardly more than a teenager. Few rushed faster to achieve their dreams than Alex: ‘I had never been in a salon de couture and had no idea what they were like, but that was of no importance. I wanted to be Number One. The best,’ he writes. In the encyclopaedic catalogue, Paris Couture Années Trente, the entry about Alex (who appears just before Mainbocher) begins: ‘This house of couture was run by an extremely young man.’ But the catalogue underestimates Alex in saying that his first show was in 1937. In fact, it was eleven years earlier as Alex sent out invites as soon as he moved into his salon, summoning potential clients and the press to see the first collection of ‘the Napoleon of couture’. Of all the things Alex lacked at various points in his life – food, stability, support – self-belief was never one of them.

The only person who was more proud of Alex than Alex himself was his sister. Almost eighty years after Alex opened his house, I found among my grandmother’s belongings several photocopies of the pages about Alex in the 1956 book, The Dressmakers of France, by Mary Brooks Picken and Dora Loues Miller. Alex had clearly sent the photocopies to my grandmother, even signing them proudly and grandly on the back, and she kept them for the rest of her life. It’s easy to see why the entry about Alex appealed to them both, because it gives a real, and merited, sense of just how extraordinary Alex’s achievement was:

He started his house in 1926. And it was his house – he had no partners, no financial backers. He was his house. And that was rare, for the combination of designer and businessman is a difficult role to maintain successfully over a period of years. His passion had always been painting – and in his studio the walls were covered with truly unusual paintings. An intimate of the great Kisling, he was also a friend of most of the living artists of his day who were considered significant. Perhaps that association explains his continued inspiration for creation. Where he obtained or inherited his business ability is unexplained. Perhaps that came from his sympathy and understanding of many types of people – businessmen as well as artists.

Alex had grown up in a world as disconnected from couture as it was from space exploration, and given how bad his father – and brothers – were at business, Picken and Miller’s comment about his business ability being ‘unexplained’ is quite an understatement. But Alex taught himself to be good at business, because he knew he needed to be so to succeed. Beauty was an ideal but Alex had learned from his father’s struggles that one cannot eat ideals. Fashion, it seemed to him, was a way of living in a world of beauty but also making money from it – an aesthetic practice but also a commercial one.

As well as being inspired by the paintings in his studio, which were mostly by his new friends, he got inspiration from the city where he lived, taking in all the Parisian elegance he saw around him, digesting it, and recreating it through clothes. He took the long dresses worn by the high-society women he saw in Renoir’s paintings and subtly modernised them, getting rid of the corsets, raising the hems and cropping the sleeves. For his first show he riffed on the outfits worn by the jockeys at Longchamp, that most Parisian scene of high society; everything, for him, was about paying homage to the beauty of Paris and trying to add to it. The critics loved it: the journalist from L’Officiel, the upmarket French fashion magazine that is still popular today, described him as ‘so talented’ but worried that he would become disheartened with how hard the business was.

They were right to worry: not a single one of his outfits from his first collection sold. Although Alex had chosen the more ostensibly glamorous profession when he opted to be a couturier near Place Vendôme over working as a tailor in the Pletzl, he had actually picked the much more difficult job. As a tailor, he would likely have been working for a contractor, who would have been in charge of selling the clothes to department stores or smaller shops around Paris.[14] This was how Jacques worked, and it saved him from having to deal with retail issues, which he could never have done. As a couturier, and a young and unestablished one, Alex had to deal with everything: the designs, the sewing, the marketing, the customers and the production. As one historian later put it: ‘Running a fashion salon [in Paris in the 1930s] took the skill of a military general; securing the assurance of a faithful following demanded the diplomacy of a minister of state.’[15]

But Alex had one thing in his favour: he never, ever admitted defeat. After he failed to sell any outfits from his first collection, he shed ‘one tear of frustration’ and then promptly gathered up his designs and sold them to the more established houses around the corner. Each of the houses asked if they were exclusive – in other words, no other house would have these patterns – and Alex unhesitatingly said yes, even while he had the money for selling the same designs to different couturiers in his back pocket. According to Alex’s memoir, the ruse was quickly discovered by Nina Ricci, then working at the design house Raffin, and she summoned the young designer to explain himself. Anyone else would have run away in fear, or at least crawled in to the meeting cringing with contrition, but Alex was defiant.

‘Alex, it was not nice of you to sell this design to other houses,’ the fearsome, white-haired designer said to him.

‘Please forgive me, but I am just starting out, what did you expect?’ he snapped back.

Fortunately, Madame Ricci already liked Alex, having met him when he did an apprenticeship at Raffin, and she asked him why he wanted to be a designer, when it was such a hard career.

‘Because I burn with new ideas – young ideas, which you don’t see in couture,’ he replied. ‘I want to give a woman the most natural beauty possible, rid her of the straitjacket of corsets, to make her supple. I want to invent a new elegance in harmony with the modern world, dressing a woman as lightly as possible. I dream of Paris, and the legendary elegance of its women. I would be proud to make a contribution to couture!’

When he finally paused for breath Madame Ricci offered him a job at Raffin, but Alex refused. He was betting, against every possible odd, that he could make it on his own.

Henri and Jacques thought they were playing it safer than their younger brother by staying in the Pletzl, slogging it out in the garment trade. In the early 1930s, they were also running a wood-carving shop, although ‘running’ was something of an overstatement. By the spring of 1931 both their businesses were bankrupt and people were chasing them for debts. But while Jacques merely shrugged at this development, seeing it as yet another hurdle in a life from which he expected nothing but hurdles, Henri was completely mortified. He’d loved his father but he had not studied so hard to live on the edge of bankruptcy as Reuben had done, and, unlike Jacques, he could not bear the humiliation of being dragged through the legal system. His ambitions might not have been as high as Alex’s, but he had a greater sense of pride than Jacques, and he hoped for more from life than his brother. Otherwise, what had been the point in coming to Paris at all? There was, he was sure, a better life out there for him.

Sara Glass.

By the early 1930s, all the Glasses were living in Paris. Sara had come home from the sanatoriums for good, healthy at last, living with her mother on rue des Rosiers and starting to think about what she wanted from life. Henri was also figuring out what he wanted to do and, like Sara, was in a city so beautiful he hardly believed he could call it home. Alex was working as a couturier, just as he’d dreamed he would, and Jacques was – occasional court appearance aside – working steadily as a furrier in the Pletzl, just down the road from his mother, which was as much as he’d ever asked of life. They were all, in their different ways, content, planning for what they imagined would be an uninterrupted future in France, working, living and maybe one day loving as they wished, and always within comfortable walking distance from one another. They had escaped what they thought were the worst of times and created lives for themselves in the most beautiful city in the world. Their story of immigration was, at this moment in time, successful. But in just a handful of years, everything that they had worked so hard to achieve would be taken away from them again by the same beast they had tried so desperately to escape.

Young Henri.

3
HENRI – Assimilation
Paris, 1930s

JUST AS LIFE was becoming good for the Glass family personally, it was getting extremely bad for Jews in Europe generally. By the early 1930s, the Great Depression crisis bit into France, travelling eastwards from the United States, while at the same time eastern European Jewish refugees were running westwards towards France for safety. This confluence of international disasters resulted in a resurgence of the French anti-Semitism that had been dammed back after the First World War, and the immigrants who were once so welcomed for filling the gaps in the workplace were now attacked for stealing French jobs. The Metz Chamber of Commerce declared: ‘These foreign competitors, highly undesirable, have become a veritable plague for honest French merchants.’ In 1931 the president of the French Medical Association complained about ‘this legion of Jews’ coming into the medical profession.[1]

Politicians and commentators pushed three lines of attack against the immigrant Jews in France: that they were taking jobs from the French, that they were Bolshevik revolutionaries determined to destroy France, and that they were diseased criminals. François Coty, the perfume magnate who owned two newspapers, L’Ami du Peuple and Le Figaro, was so horrified by the growing numbers of German Jewish refugees arriving in the city after Hitler’s election that he suggested they were a German plot to destroy France from within, and his papers relentlessly pushed this theory.[2] In 1934 Gaetan Sanvoisin wrote in Le Figaro: ‘Hitler has sent us some 50,000 German Jews who are, for the most part, extremely dangerous revolutionaries.’

Any immigrant Jew who arrived in Paris expecting to find some kind of kinship with the French Jews was disappointed. The two groups were miles apart from one another, mentally and physically. Unlike the immigrants, who were largely workers, the native Jews were more bourgeois and they certainly didn’t live in the Pletzl. They lived in the posher parts of the city and worked in liberal professions, such as banking, medicine and law.[3] They spoke French, not Yiddish, many did not bother celebrating the Sabbath, and they looked at these immigrants as potential threats to their hard-fought efforts to be part of the French bourgeoisie.[4] In other words, they were assimilated, and to the eastern European immigrant arrivals the French Jews seemed to be even more foreign than the French Catholics; differences with those you expect to be on your side are always more shocking than those you know to be your opposite. To the French Jews, the immigrants were embarrassingly backward, and their reluctance to relinquish their old traditions was baffling. Hadn’t they learned from the past that they needed to blend in? They knew these new arrivals would only exacerbate the anti-Jewish feelings in the city, and make life worse for them.[5] To differentiate themselves from these coarse newcomers, who were rapidly making up more than half of the city’s Jewish population and thus becoming a highly visible representation of Judaism to the French, many native Jews pointedly defined themselves in opposition to them. They described themselves as French first, and they complained that the new arrivals were too dirty, too noisy, too loud with their Yiddish – too obviously Jewish, in short.[6]

How much of one’s ancestral identity must one give up to live in the modern world? How much do the actions of one part of a group reflect on the whole? And is a refusal to blend in a show of strength or self-defeating rigidity? And must the choice always be between assimilation and self-ghettoisation? Could there not be an option of inclusion, which allows for acceptance of a minority group’s differences without this being seen as a threat to the majority? Natives and immigrants, Jewish and otherwise, have argued these questions for centuries, with each other and with themselves, and they will do so for centuries more. In the case of the native and immigrant Parisian Jews, the debate was irresolvable, not least because the two groups largely stayed away from one another. The French Jews didn’t want to be associated with the immigrants, and the immigrants reacted to that rejection in what would soon turn out to be the worst way possible: they remained separate from French life.[7] During the 1920s and 1930s immigrant Jews formed their own little communities in Paris, creating pockets of mini-Polands, -Russias and -Lithuanias, in the Pletzl and around Bastille and Belleville. Although this gave them a sense of community in their new country, its advantages were to prove brutally short term. Because the ghettos kept them separate from the rest of the city, the immigrants remained unknown, strange, not French and thus, later, easy to sacrifice.[8] But in a similar vein to what the Chrzanow Jews thought of the Poles and later the Germans, so the immigrant Jews in Paris believed of France: surely their neighbours would protect them. And again, like the Chrzanow Jews, they were to be proven wrong.

Chaya especially and Jacques largely typified the behaviour of immigrant Jews: they remained unassimilated and stayed among Polish Jewish immigrants. Henri, Alex and Sara, by contrast, were more on the side of the French Jews. To them, Poland was a backward pit of hate and ignorance. Next to cultured, beautiful Paris, where people weren’t beating them up in the street, there was no question in their minds with which country they wanted to identify.

Alex and Sara had been happy to slough off their Polish identities as soon as they arrived in Paris. They were born in 1906 and 1910 respectively and so largely associated Chrzanow with the war and pogroms. But Jacques and Henri had lived there longer, and for that reason Jacques struggled more to shrug off his past entirely: he considered himself French but he remained rooted in the world of other immigrants, rarely mixing with native French people.

Henri, however, made a seamless chameleonic break. Strikingly tall – at least six foot two – and handsome, with a broad forehead and dark deep-set eyes, Henri set out to become a proper Frenchman. He learned the language quickly and while Alex proudly kept his Yiddish accent all his life, Henri soon sounded entirely French. His reasons were more personal than political: Poland to him represented his father’s death, and his years away studying had taken him further, geographically and mentally, from the shtetl world. For Henri, Poland was the past, France was the future, and that meant assimilating.

Jewish assimilation had a complicated history long before Jehuda Glahs became Jules Henri Glass. Chanukah, now one of the best-known Jewish holidays, is a celebration of Jews who refused to assimilate, as it’s a festival in memory of a small group of Jews who in 2 BC disobeyed their Greek-Syrian oppressors by not worshipping their gods. And yet the only reason Chanukah – always a minor holiday on the Jewish calendar – is so well-known now is because of its proximity to Christmas. As a result, Chanukah has turned into a quasi-Jewish Christmas and so, with an apt kind of Jewish irony, Chanukah itself has become assimilated.

And yet, especially after the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many Jews saw assimilation as a positive, progressive step; being part of the modern world instead of hiding from it behind shtetl walls, disguised within thick black clothes. Assimilation meant, as it did to Henri, having more options than one’s parents did. But others felt the cost of assimilation both too high and impossible. Jews would always be seen as the vilified outsiders.

Some of the most influential thinking about Jewish assimilation was inspired by events in Paris shortly before the Glass family moved there. After witnessing the Dreyfus scandal, Theodor Herzl, the Jewish journalist and political activist, rejected his earlier writings urging Jewish assimilation. Instead, he became the father of modern Zionism, telling Jews they would never be safe no matter how much they assimilated, so they should stay true to their identity and establish a Jewish homeland. Assimilated Jews loathed this theory, as they saw it as undermining all their efforts to become a part of their country’s civic life. And yet these efforts were, in the eyes of others, pointless: many non-Jews then believed that Jews could never be truly assimilated into a western country, and the question of how much they could be, or whether they could be at all, was known as the Jewish Question. So Herzl’s turnaround was, in the context of his time, pretty understandable.

Assimilated Jews could argue that Zionism was ultimately analogous to what German writers such as Theodor Fritsch, author of The Handbook of the Jewish Question, suggested when he argued that Jews should be kept separate, even banished, so as not to contaminate the Aryan race. This partly explains why some of the earliest and most enthusiastic supporters of Zionism were not Jews, but rather evangelical Christians and anti-Semites, and there was and is some but by no means a complete overlap between the two groups. Evangelicals believe that Jews returning to their homeland will hasten the return of the Messiah. Alongside this, Zionism still has enormous popularity among anti-Semites who are a lot less concerned with providing the Jews with a homeland than they are with simply segregating them.[9] Herzl saw where matters were heading for Jews in Europe long before others did.

France might have been known as une terre d’asile but the French most definitely did not see themselves as a nation of immigrants. Immigrants were expected to assimilate and those who kept themselves separate and retained their original identity were regarded as suspicious. Antipathy to what critics would call the self-ghettoisation of immigrants and what defenders would call immigrants’ distinctive identity was prevalent on both the left and the right in France,[10] and this attitude was hardly unique to France or the early twentieth century. In pretty much every western country today there is a belief that people who come to a new country should assimilate, almost as a show of gratitude, or at the very least politeness. Today this is mainly – but not solely – voiced by the right and is aimed largely at black and Muslim immigrants rather than Jewish ones.

But France had a particular passion for cultural assimilation, one that has only continued to sharpen, because of the country’s devotion to the principle of laïcité, or secularity. Originally intended as a neutral, even benign principle, laïcité was instituted in 1905 with the separation of Church and state, which meant that state funding was withdrawn from religions in order to place all faiths on an equal footing and protect schools in particular from the influence of the Catholic Church. But whereas in America today the separation of Church and state means the state cannot interfere in religion, in France it means all signs of religion are banned in the public sphere, which has led to endless torturous arguments about whether Muslim women can wear headscarves or burkinis. As many modern Muslim writers have pointed out, stopping a Muslim woman from covering herself does not mean she’ll go skipping down the Croisette in a bikini like a twenty-first-century Brigitte Bardot, but rather that she’ll cloister herself off even further from French society. And to a certain extent this is what Chaya did: aware that she was not part of or welcome in French bourgeois society as she was, she stayed firmly in the Pletzl. Henri, Alex and Sara, who had the active desire to assimilate, did otherwise.

Despite what right-wing politicians today suggest, assimilation is neither simple nor the answer. There exists, allegedly, a magical sweet spot where immigrants are assimilated enough so as not to offend natives with their jarringly exotic customs, but not so assimilated that they are stealing natives’ jobs and diluting the culture of the country. Immigrants are blamed by the media and politicians for not locating this spot themselves, but no one else has ever been able to define its whereabouts either, primarily because its location shifts depending on a country’s economic situation.

By the 1930s, growing numbers of French people came to see dangers in the idea of Jews assimilating, mixing among them unrecognised. After the relaxation of naturalisation laws in 1927, right-wing newspapers and politicians spoke doomfully about immigrants taking jobs as well as Jews corrupting French society with their Bolshevik ideas and infecting the people with their strange foreign germs. When it came to assimilation, Jews couldn’t win: mix into the culture and they were condemned; stay separate and they were damned. The Jewish Question was becoming a seemingly irresolvable puzzle and it would not be long before someone offered up the Final Solution.

Today, Jewish assimilation remains controversial, and while you still hear anti-Semites warning against it, some of the most striking critics are ultra-Orthodox Jews, who use the same arguments as those advanced by the rabbinical traditionalists of the nineteenth century. (And their fidelity to those arguments is, in their eyes, the point.) According to a study carried out by the Rabbinical Centre of Europe in 2014, as many as 85 per cent of Jews in Europe are assimilated, leading one member of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate Council to lament: ‘The assimilation in the shocking numbers that we see is worse than the Holocaust we saw.’[11]

You don’t need to be assimilated, or Jewish, to find this statement repulsive. But it is true that recognisably observant Jewish people and communities are far less commonly seen in Europe today than they were at the beginning of the twentieth century. That’s not just because the Holocaust killed off so many of them[12] and many of the survivors went elsewhere (Israel, mainly), although both of those factors are certainly part of it – it’s because the successive generations have assimilated. Contrary to what Herzl and many others thought, Jewish assimilation has proven to be more than possible – it has become inevitable. As society has become increasingly secular, and Jews have made secure lives for themselves in western countries, often intermarrying with other faiths, the story of Jewish identity in the late twentieth century became a story of assimilation. Whether Jews are truly accepted depends on which Jew you ask, and how many times they’ve been accused on social media that day of being part of a Zionist conspiracy. But in terms of Jews living, working and socialising with non-Jews, this has become such a non-issue it’s almost hard to believe there was a time when it was otherwise, although that time is still very much in living memory: my grandparents would have been horrified if my father had married a non-Jewish woman, while my parents could not have cared less about the religion of my sister’s and my chosen partners. Jews have become more assimilated with each successive generation, and this is certainly borne out by my family. And for us, the path that led us here began with Henri.

All the Glass siblings were style-conscious, thanks to Reuben’s influence, but Henri approached fashion the most methodically, because it was part of his process of becoming French. He studied how his neighbours looked and he copied them, buying three-piece suits when he could find them second-hand; double-breasted wool coats with velvet collars; starchy white shirts and silk ties, and always a hat. Henri’s style was yet another thing Alex admired about his brother, and whenever he could find the material, he made pocket handkerchiefs for him, which Henri would carefully iron and then fold neatly to stick out of his breast pocket. In everything, from his studies to his appearance, he was utterly meticulous.

He was also a very private person, so when I started to research him I originally worried he might be the lacuna in the book, as he never talked about himself.

‘Did your father leave anything that might tell me about the past – an address book, perhaps, or even old calendars?’ I asked his daughter, Danièle, the first time I interviewed her for this book in her flat in Paris.

‘Oh yes, a couple of things. Come down to the basement, I’ll show you,’ she said mildly.

I followed her down the stairs, expecting, at most, some old birthday cards, perhaps a business card or two. She unlocked the door to her building’s storage unit and there were four suitcases, each containing every receipt Henri ever got, every business transaction he conducted, every letter he received and every photo he ever took, all perfectly filed in perfect French. Henri’s careful bookkeeping 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. As a result I probably now know more about the minutiae of his business affairs than I do about my own.

For Henri, there was one big hurdle to his assimilation into French society: his failing businesses with Jacques. By 1931 the letters from lawyers were threatening the brothers with jail, each one another kick at his dreams. A man who has the bailiffs chasing him couldn’t be a respectable Frenchman, after all. At last, one spring day, the worst letter arrived, telling him to meet the lawyer’s assistant in Gare Saint-Lazare, in la Salle des Pas Perdus – the Room of Lost Steps, the poetic French name for the hallway or waiting area in railway stations or courthouses – and she would serve him with bankruptcy papers. He dressed wearily that morning, putting on his three-piece suit, fully expecting this to be the end of his brief Parisian life. Instead, it marked the true beginning of it.

Sophie Huttner, also known as Sonia, was born in 1905 in Kopyczynce, a small city 500 kilometres to the east of Chrzanow, in what is now the Ukraine. Born into a middle-class Jewish family and exceptionally bright from a young age, she moved to Paris in 1928 to study at the Sorbonne,[13] but she really came to experience life, and she certainly succeeded in that. At the time she arranged to serve this tall, quiet man with bankruptcy papers, she’d had at least two boyfriends, a Prussian prince and a man from Barcelona, and she later hinted there had been more; Sonia had always been popular with men, and it was not hard to see why. Although not beautiful the way Sara was – Sonia’s features were earthier and less delicate – she was sexy, smart, funny and flirtatious, and she knew how to tip her head down and then look up at a man through her lashes with an irresistible little smile. As soon as Henri saw her, waiting for him in the Room of Lost Steps, he fell hopelessly in love.

Henri and Sonia shortly after they met in Paris, 1930s.

Although both were Jewish and raised in Austria-Hungary, their backgrounds were utterly different. Henri’s father had been a travelling salesman, whereas Sonia’s father was a government official. Henri had to learn French when he arrived in Paris but Sonia had grown up speaking it, because her nanny had been a dispossessed French aristocrat. Sonia didn’t even really have to work, and she lived comfortably on her family’s money for her first few years in France. But she was too smart to sit around, and she had enough drive to power the whole of Paris. She was fluent in half a dozen languages: French, Polish, German, Spanish, English, Portuguese, and she could easily switch between them in conversation. So she worked as an interpreter at several companies and as a secretary at others, and it just so happened that she was working as a secretary in a lawyer’s office when she was sent to serve papers at Gare Saint-Lazare.

Henri was thirty-one when he met Sonia, but I could find no record of any other girlfriends in his past – no names mentioned among his letters, no teasing references by Sonia during their long lifetime together. It is entirely possible she was his first girlfriend, and he was certainly besotted by her. Henri was a keen photographer and while he took, at most, a few dozen photos of his family, he took hundreds of photos of Sonia during their courtship: here’s Sonia looking up coquettishly on a bridge; here’s Sonia in a beret, tight pencil skirt and sexy halter-neck top, plucking a leaf from a bush. Henri loved to photograph her, and Sonia loved to be photographed, posing with the ease of one who never lacked confidence about her looks. In one photo, taken in someone’s room, Sonia poses by a bed in a pair of high-waisted trousers and jacket. In the second picture, she has taken off the jacket to reveal a skimpy vest top, and she is now sitting on the bed. In the last, she has rolled the straps of her vest off her shoulder and she is lying on the bed and spreading her legs, looking into the camera with a sexuality so frank it is unnerving. I found these photos among Sonia’s possessions, twenty years after she died, and I let out a yelp when I got to the last one; you don’t expect to find eighty-year-old evidence of your great-uncle and great-aunt’s love life on an average Tuesday afternoon.

And apparently it was a very happy love life: Henri and Sonia got married on Christmas Day 1932, in Lwow, not far from where Sonia grew up, so her family could attend. Adolf Hitler would become chancellor of Germany just a few weeks later, but among the dozens of cards and letters the couple received from Sonia’s relatives and friends back home, many of whom would be killed in the Holocaust within a decade, there was only joy and hope for the future: ‘May you have a long and happy wedded life! Love, the Liebermans’; ‘Wishing joy and long life, the Zygfryd Reizs’; ‘God bless the newlyweds and their families on this happy day, the Koenigow Mlyniecs.’ And in one of Sonia’s scrapbooks I found a telegram from her new sister-in-law in France, dated 25/12/1932: ‘Bonheur bonheur bonheur de tout coeur – Sara.’

Henri didn’t have as much money as the Prussian prince, and maybe wasn’t as exciting as the man from Barcelona. But Sonia chose him because, as she explained to their daughter decades later, ‘I saw he was a good son and brother.’

Which was not to say that she was wild about his family. Chaya she quickly got the measure of when Henri took her to his mother’s flat on rue des Rosiers and she saw how much Henri longed to get some kind of independence from her. So she fashioned herself between them, stepping in whenever Chaya asked Henri to accompany her to synagogue or to do her shopping at the local kosher markets. Jacques, Sonia thought, was sweet, the sweetest of them all, only lacking in backbone. Sara bemused her with her love of fashion. But Sara told her how happy she was to have a real sister – she’d had Mindel, but Mindel had died so long ago, and she had Rose Ornstein, but Rose was really her cousin. Sonia was her sister! She’d desperately wanted a sister, and Sonia, touched, told her she felt the same.

Sonia and Sara.

Alex was a different story: Sonia and Alex loathed one another from the moment they met. Alex couldn’t believe that his idolised older brother – so tall and so handsome! – who, to his mind, could have had his pick of any Frenchwoman in Paris would choose this short, dumpy Polack. Henri had been a father figure to Alex for pretty much all of his life, ever since Reuben went off to war, and he reacted to Sonia’s arrival like a petulant child to a new stepmother. He thought she was ugly, fat and unworthy of his brother. And Sonia, who sized up Alex about as quickly as she did Chaya, saw in Alex an arrogant bully. Neither of them ever found cause to alter their first impression.

But family aside, Henri and Sonia were blissfully content newlyweds. Sonia had a much easier relationship with her past than Henri, because her childhood had been much happier. There were no tortured issues about identity, assimilation or non-assimilation for Sonia: she had grown up multilingual, so flitting between nationalities felt utterly natural to her, and her language skills were so good she was often mistaken for a native of multiple countries. And yet, even though Sonia spoke Polish and Yiddish, they almost always spoke to one another in French.

Henri, Sonia, Sara, Chaya and Jacques in Henri and Sonia’s apartment shortly after their marriage.

Soon after they were settled in their new apartment, on rue Victor-Cousin, just next to the Sorbonne, they held a housewarming supper for the Glasses, to compensate for the fact that none of them could travel to Lwow for the wedding. Henri took a photo of the evening to commemorate it, and I found the picture, eighty years later, in a small envelope on which he had written ‘famille’. Henri is the first one you notice in the photo, because he is the only one standing. In fact, he appears to be in mid-leap, as he has presumably dashed into the photo frame after having set up the camera. But even in his haste, his three-piece suit sits perfectly on him and every hair is perfectly in place. The only difference about him in this photo compared to previous ones is how happy he clearly is: he is making an unabashed open-mouthed smile and both hands are resting gently on Sonia, who is sitting in front of him. Sonia looks a little more solemn, and with her drooping shoulders and slightly raised eyebrows she looks like she’s asking the camera on the exhale, ‘Can you believe I’m stuck with this lot now?’ By contrast, Sara next to her looks absolutely delighted. She is twenty-two and a striking beauty; her confident pose, with her chin resting coquettishly on the backs of her fingers, makes her, for once, overshadow her usually more dominating sister-in-law. Chaya is seated next to her, a little in the shadows and, as usual, her eyes are going in two different directions, one looking suspiciously at the viewer, the other at Sonia. And finally there is Jacques, not quite as smartly dressed as Henri, but still stylish and very handsome, with the same finely drawn features as Sara. He is holding a French newspaper, whose front page bears a picture of Marshal Pétain, who had just been made Minister of War, and would in six years’ time become the chief of state of Vichy France. He would have more to do with the direction of Jacques’s life than Jacques could ever have imagined as he dangled the newspaper between his long thin fingers. Whereas everyone else in the photo is looking at the camera, Jacques is gazing off to the side, as if he was about to head in a different direction to the rest of them. Alex is not in the photo. Presumably he declined Henri’s invitation.

‘My father was brilliant, but he never had any success before he met my mother,’ Henri and Sonia’s daughter Danièle told me. And she was right. One of the first moves Sonia made when she and Henri got together was to help him get off the bankruptcy charge, and the second was to extricate him from his business with Jacques. Henri felt enormous guilt about leaving his brother, but, as Sonia rightly perceived, Jacques didn’t actually care that much about the business, and certainly didn’t hold it against his brother for leaving it. At last, Henri was free of the work that had caused him so much anxiety, and brought him so little satisfaction. He could simply enjoy his happy marriage with Sonia. But he now had another concern: it was 1935, he was thirty-four, and worried.

‘My time is running out,’ Sonia later recalled him saying.

But fate already had a plan for him, one more befitting to his education than running a fur and carpentry shop. Henri, or quite possibly Sonia, had recently met a man who worked at the Sorbonne Science Faculty. He said that he needed a machine that could reproduce documents quickly and cheaply, and yet no such machine existed in the whole of France. Did anyone know a man who might be able to help, perhaps one with engineering and photography experience?

Henri had finished his engineering studies a decade earlier, but he had forgotten none of it. Sonia obtained a false identity card for him on the black market so, at long last, he could get a job that utilised his education, and he went to work in the Sorbonne, like the proper Frenchman he longed to be. He could finally leave the Pletzl behind and use the skills he’d studied so hard to acquire at university. And Henri wasn’t just a good engineer, he was a truly original one. According to his American patent application, which was accepted on 12 February 1940, he made a machine ‘whereby reproductions may be made on the same scale as the original or on different scales … The prints may be made on glass, negatives, films or sensitized papers.’ In other words, he made a machine that reproduced not just documents but blueprints on microfilm and paper, and these reproductions could be to scale or – crucially – shrunk to much smaller size, making them both easy to store and illegible to anyone until Henri’s machine then reproduced them again at full size. This was to become the machine’s most important feature, and Henri was using technology that was then at the absolute cutting edge. No other machine in France could do this. Henri named his machine the Omniphot.

In less than a year, he sold versions of it to the Paris Observatory, the Army Geographic Service (now known as the Institut Géographique National) and the Paris Municipal School of Physics and Chemistry. Henri was so successful that in 1937 – just two years after despairing of the direction of his life to Sonia – he showed his Omniphot machine at the Paris fair, where it was spotted by a businessman called Marc Haenel. Monsieur Haenel instantly spotted the potential of Henri’s invention and convinced him to go into business with him to create their own company, Photosia, where they would do specialist microfilming. Henri agreed. This was to prove an extremely fortuitous meeting, and just in time, too: Henri’s machine would soon be desperately needed by the Resistance movement, and his adopted country turned out to need him at least as much as he needed it.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.