House of Glass Read online

  ‘I think that you are right. Someone has to stay and fight with the Allies, but personally I have 7,000 men to repatriate and can’t in good conscience abandon them before they are safely home,’ Béthouart replied.[14]

  So General Béthouart, Alex and the rest of the demobilising soldiers sailed first to Casablanca, where they stayed for a few weeks, and then to Marseille. Among the other returning soldiers was a young man called Jean Seytour. It was a sad return for the soldiers to their homeland, a now humiliated France. But Alex was full of defiance, because he and Seytour had a plan.

  ‘In Grenoble, under the patronage of Béthouart, my friends, including Seytour, swore to form a “sizaine” [six-pack], a resistance group of men acting under the rule of secrecy,’ Alex wrote. ‘Because the Armistice had been signed and defeat accepted. But for us, the resistance had just begun.’

  6

  SARA – Emigration

  Paris and New York, late 1930s

  THE DAY SARA’S LIFE changed for ever did not seem portentous to her until it was too late. As usual, she woke up in the flat she shared with her mother on rue des Rosiers, early because she had to get to work, but not so early that her mother hadn’t already cooked her breakfast. Sara had never been a good eater, and she never would be, so she picked at the food Chaya had made. And then after kissing her mother goodbye, she walked out of their two-room apartment, down the hall past the communal telephone that had recently been installed for all the residents, out the door and onto the streets of the Pletzl. It was February 1937 and she was twenty-six years old.

  WHEN I STARTED working on this book, I’d planned to focus on my grandmother, but it quickly became clear that was impossible – partly because her and her siblings’ lives were so entwined but also because she turned out to be the hardest to research. Whereas her brothers led lives of masculine adventure, which were then recorded in official archives, my grandmother represented the quiet feminine: domestic, private – what George Eliot describes in Middlemarch as ‘a hidden life’, and she made sure to hide as much of it as possible. And so, as Eliot says, my grandmother’s was a life of ‘unrecorded acts’, which is not an easy proposition for a memoirist. I’d always preferred domestic stories to action ones, but when I started my research I felt myself doing what I’d done to her in life: I avoided her. Investigating Alex Maguy’s adventures was both practically and emotionally easier than prying into my grandmother’s melancholia.

  When I at last turned my attention to her, I initially did a kind of displacement activity, searching through archival records for her life, those bureaucratic background cameras ticking off the key moments: here’s a marriage, here’s a house move, here’s a death. But I eventually realised that the reason I wanted to tell my grandmother’s story was not because of things that happened to her, as was the case with her brothers, but because of the inner emotional drama that she thought she hid away but never could, not really. We all picked it up from her, but no one ever talked about it, or explained it. My father and uncle didn’t ask her about it because they feared exacerbating it, and I didn’t ask them about it because I could see how much it pained them. But if I’d pushed her away because of it in life, I could at least try to understand her after she died. And that was a story I was not going to find in archives.

  So I had to talk to those who knew her best, and that meant her sons: Ronald and Richard, my father and uncle. I dreaded hurting them by asking difficult questions, but it turned out that what had hurt them most was feeling like they had to keep these stories to themselves. At first they, like me, found it easier to talk about action than emotions, and my father sent me near daily emails with attached photos he had of his mother doing things: dancing with her husband in Long Island, visiting him in Paris when he was an adult, sitting with me in New York when I was a child. After several dozen of these, I went to see him and said that I had enough photos – what I needed was details of her life, and by that I meant her emotional life. He went silent and looked down, withdrawing inside his own thoughts. When I went home later that evening I expected little to come of that conversation. But the next day he sent a long email detailing exactly what I’d asked for, and then several more over the next few weeks. Slowly, Sara’s life, which she’d always kept in the shadows, came into focus.

  IN THE WINTER OF 1937, all the Glass siblings were happy – happier than they’d ever been, happier than they’d ever imagined they could be. Henri and Jacques were married to women who loved them, Alex was successful in his career. But of them all, Sara was the most surprised by her happiness because, during her long years in the sanatoriums, she’d had the best cause to assume it would always elude her.

  When she finally returned to Paris for good in the early 1930s, Alex frequently took her to the galleries and while he loved the Monets, the Cézannes and, most of all, the Picassos, she preferred the Renoirs. At home she painted pictures of Renoir-esque young women, with their soft eyes, chestnut-coloured pompadours and gentle smiles. When at last she was well enough to start working, she decided to follow a career that allowed her to use the only talents she had confidence in: drawing and painting. She didn’t have Alex’s manic drive to achieve the impossible, but nor did she have Jacques’s quiet acceptance of the least life had to offer, so she enrolled as a non-matriculated student at the École des Beaux-Arts to study fine art. Every day she would leave the Pletzl and cross the Pont Neuf, walk through the school’s grand gates, and study in the elegant nineteenth-century building, the chic Boulevard Saint-Germain on one side and the Louvre on the other, Parisian style to her left and classical art to her right. After she finished her course Sara decided to follow Alex and Jacques into the garment trade, not in couture or as a tailor in the Pletzl, but rather something in between. She got a job at a wholesale clothing supplier making patterns for fabrics sold to the mass market. Decades later, she would show her sons some of the designs she had made: patterns full of colour and swirling lines, often with paisley shapes – a psychedelic rejection of the brown drabness of her childhood and the antiseptic, linear whiteness of the sanatoriums. Like Alex, she knew life had more to offer than what she had known, and she was seizing it through her designs. Like Henri, she set out to be as Parisian as possible, not because she thought about assimilation, but because Paris fitted her as naturally as a silk dress fits a doe-eyed woman in a Renoir painting.

  Some people will move to a foreign country and it will still feel foreign after thirty years, their home country always being their baseline for normality. Others will feel naturally at home after a matter of weeks. The relationship one has with a place is as deeply felt as one’s relationship with a person. Sometimes the place that fits you best is what was once unimaginably far afield, and other times it will be the street where you grew up; you might find true love with a holiday romance or you might find it with the boy next door. But no matter how much you love your adopted country, it’s harder than people think to bury your origins, especially if you move after puberty, as Sara did. The cadences of our thoughts, never mind our speech, tend to be set by then. Most of us still dream of our childhood home, and when we read scenes in novels set in a home, a school, a park, it’s the ones we knew from our youth that we picture, no matter how long ago we left them behind. The mind’s eye has a way of snapping us back to the past. So do our parents. I moved from New York to London when I was three years younger than Sara, and, like her, I quickly felt at ease in my new home. Yet I still have my American accent, thirty years after moving to London, and this is largely because my parents still have theirs. To speak differently from my parents would require a strength of will and lack of self-consciousness I apparently do not have, and, as a result, English people still see me as American.

  Sara, however, had no such difficulties. Maybe she did dream of Chrzanow, and maybe she thought of her home on Kostalista when she read books, but she never mentioned it. None of the Glass siblings did. They never pointed to a building and said, ‘Oh, that reminds me of
our school back in Chrzanow’, never compared a street in Paris to Aleja Henryka. Chaya never spoke French, and with her heavily accented Polish and Yiddish she reminded her children of their origins with every syllable. Perhaps because Sara lived with her until she was twenty-six, her crisp French was occasionally sprinkled with the odd Polish or Yiddish expression; when she was tired she would say, ‘Je suis feshluffen’, and when she had to carry something she ‘schlepped’ it. But in the main, her identity was wholly rooted in France. I was amazed to discover Sara was as Polish as I am American, because while I come across like a nationality mongrel, she never seemed anything other than French to me.

  But while I will always have happy associations with the city of my childhood, Sara did not have that luxury. Her memories of her home town were terrible: the poverty, the pogroms, her father’s protracted death. She left it physically and she also left it mentally. There was no home behind her that she even had the option of returning to; it had disappeared behind her like the ground crumbling away beneath the feet of a cartoon character frantically running for safety. So when she made herself over as French, it was partly because she wanted to, but also because she had to.

  And France was good to her in return. By her early twenties she was working in a job she loved and living near the brothers she adored, in a city that made her heart expand just by looking at it. Her beloved cousin whom she played with in childhood, Rose Ornstein, had married a doctor called Herman Brenner, a close friend of Rose’s brother Alex. Dr Brenner was very kind to Sara, helping her manage her pleurisy when she was back in Paris, and Sara often went to visit them in their apartment nearby. She would look around at their happy home and dream of a time she, too, might have her own apartment, away from her mother. And just then, she met a man.

  His name has long since vanished in history, because Sara never spoke about him later in life, and her brothers avoided the subject. But he was, Sonia later told Sara’s sons, a dental student, Jewish, a socialist and she loved him. Soon after they met they were engaged. There are glimpses of him in the photo album I found in my grandmother’s closet, or at least of a man who looks like he probably was him: dark-haired and young, and in the one photo that survives of them together, handsome and smartly dressed, on a picnic with a group of friends, her arm looped casually through his. As Sara walked to work on that cold morning in February 1937, hours away from when her life would change, perhaps she thought about their imminent wedding, and especially about her life after the wedding. She would move out of her mother’s apartment, at last, and her life would truly begin. Henri and Jacques were happy in 1937 because they were happily married; Alex was happy because he loved his work. Sara was about to have both professional and marital contentment. She was at that wonderful point in a young person’s life when it feels like everything is about to begin and the world seems fringed with joy. And then that evening, when she came home from work, her mother told her that Alex was coming over for supper, and he was bringing some colleagues.

  The week before in Berlin, Adolf Hitler had given a two-hour-long speech to mark the fourth anniversary of the Nazis’ seizure of power in Germany. In a typically rambling and demented speech he promised that ‘the National Socialist Movement will prevent the Jewish people from intruding themselves among all the other nations as elements of internal disruption, under the mask of honest world-citizens, and thus gaining power over these nations.’[1] In France, the ostensibly liberal Popular Front government was adopting a hardline stance towards refugees, as it knew Hitler’s rise would mean more Jews would come to France seeking asylum, and this, it concluded, would be problematic. ‘The problem of German refugees has far more serious demographic ramifications than any other refugee problem has ever had, and it must therefore incline us toward prudence,’ read one internal foreign ministry memorandum from a few months earlier.[2] The French art world, as Alex knew, had already shut out the Jewish artists in the country.

  Sara would not have been thinking about any of that. Alex, however, very much was, as he climbed the stairs to his mother and sister’s apartment on that February evening in 1937. And following behind him was a couple, and a thirty-five-year-old man.

  When Sara later described this meeting to her children and grandchildren, she would tell it quietly, shyly, self-deprecatingly, focusing on the practicalities of how she ended up in the United States. Alex and the second man told it with more enthusiasm and bluster, proud of their active roles in this tale. Sonia had a more wry take on the proceedings. But this is probably the only story in the entirety of my family’s existence about which there has never been any disagreement. Everyone agreed about who was there, what they said, what they thought and what happened next. But at the time, only one person in the room understood what was actually going on, and how this story would likely play out. And that person was definitely not Sara.

  The three guests were American: Oscar and Rosa Kellerman,[3] and Bill Freiman, and he was tall – taller even than Henri. None of the Americans spoke French, and none of the Glasses spoke English but Bill spoke Yiddish, so he acted as translator. They all sat around Chaya’s kitchen table – Alex, Sara, the Kellermans, Bill. The Kellermans, Bill explained, were in Paris to do business with Alex, and he was going to travel around the Alps once the Kellermans didn’t need him any more – had Sara ever visited the Alps? Sara had no wish to talk about the sanatoriums, so she shook her head. Anyway, there wasn’t much room to talk because Alex, as usual, filled the room with his words, saying he’d brought his guests here because he promised them the best kosher food in the whole of Paris, and he talked about which famous person had worn his coat this week and what magazine he’d been in last week. Sara couldn’t figure out the relationship between the Kellermans and Mr Freiman: the Kellermans were obviously married, but, as she would tell her children years later, Mrs Kellerman seemed to be flirting with Mr Freiman, plucking at his sleeve, batting her lashes at him, trying to get something from him – attention, acknowledgement – which he clearly had no wish to give. Instead, confusingly, he stared only at her as he told jokes about the things he’d seen in Paris. He said how happy he was to be getting some good Jewish food at last because the French food was intolerable, and he made jokes about that, too. But Sara never really liked jokes, at least not the kind he was making. He was handsome, but his Yiddish was coarse, rough, working class and he made no attempt to hide that. Anyway, she’d always preferred men who looked more like her father and Jacques, dark and delicate. With those bright blue eyes and a big handlebar moustache, he was like a cowboy in a Hollywood movie. Sara had never liked cowboy movies: she liked French actors like Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer, so chic and elegant. This American, with his jokes and his broad chest, was more like John Wayne.

  ‘Dinner is ready,’ said Chaya, bringing out the food and taking her seat.

  Mr Kellerman ate hungrily, apparently unaware of or unbothered by his wife’s increasingly obvious flirtations with Bill. Sara, as usual, picked at her food, and when Bill asked if she worked Alex answered for her.

  ‘She’s an artist, I told you – really nice paintings, and such a beauty herself all the famous artists want to paint her,’ he said, to Sara’s confusion. Not only was that not true but Alex never spoke that way about her.

  Sara mostly kept her head down but every time she looked up she noticed Bill was staring at her and it unnerved her, so she quickly looked down again. Then, just as Alex was about to launch into another story about his great fashion successes, Bill interrupted him.

  ‘You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen and I am completely in love with you,’ he said, looking straight at Sara.

  The room went silent.

  ‘Come to America with me next month. I’ll get you a return ticket so you can go back if you want. But come with me. I’m an honest, hard-working man and I’ll take care of you,’ he continued, reaching his arm across the table.

  Sara did not reach back to take his hand. Instead, she m
ade a forced laugh. ‘Is this the famous American sense of humour?’ she asked.

  But he shook his head, shaking off her hint. ‘I am not joking. I fell in love with you the minute I saw you. Come with me. I will look after you. I promise,’ he said.

  Sara looked to Alex for help, but for once he said nothing. Her mother also sat there silently. Mrs Kellerman couldn’t understand what was happening but she had a good idea, and she looked like she was about to burst with fury. Only Mr Kellerman kept eating, utterly unfazed by the scene in front of him. Sara realised no one was going to help her here, so she told Bill that he was clearly drunk and if he didn’t stop it she would have to ask him to leave.

  Dinner continued, awkwardly, with Bill pointedly staring at her and Sara pointedly staring down at her plate. At least, she thought, after this dinner she wouldn’t have to see him again. It would be over.

  It was not over. Alex brought the American over twice more that week for dinner – without the Kellermans, at least – and both times the scene replayed itself, with him telling Sara that he loved her. If she thought she would be free of him once he finally sailed back to America on 2 March, she had once again underestimated him. As soon as he was back home a week later the phone calls began. Every few days he called her on her building’s shared phone, begging her to come and join him, telling her he loved her, promising to treat her well. Just one transatlantic phone call in those days would have been a big deal; a dozen was akin to him sending her diamonds.