living
A
s a girl, Hadley Freeman found her
grandmother Sara a perplexing and distant
figure. “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,” writes
Freeman. Just what lay behind that sadness, however,
was something that Freeman would only learn after
her grandmother died, in the process of writing this
book. She would learn, too, about the lives of her
grandmother’s three brothers, and find in the Glass
siblings (fittingly, given the name they adopted) a lens
onto Jewish life in the twentieth century.
Henri, Jacques, Alex and Sara Glass were born in
the early 1900 s to two peasant Jews in the village of
Chrzanów (now in Poland, then in Austro-Hungary).
Their original names were Jehuda, Jakob, Sender
and Sala Glahs: “Jews’ names as a whole in this
period were unfixed, mutable,” notes Freeman. Driven
from their home by pogroms, finding refuge in Paris,
it makes sense that they would obscure their origins.
But antisemitism was unconstrained by borders. In
1940 , Nazi forces occupied the Glass’s adopted home,
and found many French citizens who were ready
to assist in eliminating their country’s Jews.
The Glasses’ stories are by turns breathtaking
and heartbreaking. Henri was denounced by
neighbours and spent the war largely in hiding.
Jacques, who was the least assimilated and the most
trusting, died in a concentration camp. Alex lived a life
of drama: a fashion designer, a resistance fighter, and
by the end of his life, a fixture of the fine art scene.
And Sara was married off to an American by Alex and
survived, but at the cost of leaving her beloved Paris
for exile in New York suburbia. It’s a luminously
written family saga that surpasses fiction and reveals
the deepest truths, both personal and political.House of Glass
When she began to explore her
grandmother’s past, Hadley Freeman
discovered four exceptional stories,
each leading in a different directionWords: Sarah DitumREVIEW & INTERVIEW