House of Glass Read online

  Initially she scoffed at his proposals, but Alex started to push her to accept them (it had been Alex, of course, who gave Bill Sara’s building’s phone number). He told her the Nazis were coming and were going to kill them all. This invitation to America was a gift from God and if she turned it down she was as stupid as Mila. If she went to America she would be able to get the rest of them out of Europe – and if she didn’t, she was condemning them to death.

  ‘You’re going to kill us, is that what you want? You marrying this guy is our last chance,’ Alex would tell her, while she cried in a chair.

  Other times, he would try a different tactic, one covered more in sugar than vinegar: ‘He’s a millionaire on Park Avenue, he works in the fashion business – what more could you want? He’s a handsome guy, and so tall! Taller even than Henri! I’ve known him for years, he’s a great guy,’ he would say, smiling at her, stroking her pale hand. One man was pulling her to America and the other pushing her, and between them she started to break.

  Eventually she went to Henri for help. What should she do? She didn’t want to leave her home, her fiancé, her family. But if she didn’t, would they all be killed by the Germans? Henri sighed. While he didn’t follow the news quite as closely as Alex, he certainly knew about what was happening in Europe, mainly because of Sonia. She read newspapers every day, in multiple languages, and she had been warning Henri about Hitler for years. Henri also had kept some friends from his time in Danzig, and so he knew very well how that city had been taken over by the Nazis in 1933, and how the Jews had had to flee. Meanwhile Sonia heard frequently from her family scattered around Poland about the rise of fascist groups there. So when Henri had mentioned Alex’s plan to Sonia the week before, after having heard about it from his mother, Sonia said, unhesitatingly, ‘She should go.’ They’d all lived through pogroms and terror before. The prospect of any of these things returning was not an abstract concept to them.

  ‘You should go,’ Henri told Sara.

  ‘And that’s when your grandmother knew she was going,’ Sonia later told me.

  Sara went to Rose and Herman Brenner’s apartment and cried, and they told her she should listen to Henri; maybe Rose and Herman would come and live in America, too, one day. Who knew what might happen with the world’s politics going the way they were? In what must have been a state close to shock, Sara began to accept that she was going to America to marry a man she didn’t know and liked less. She would never have done it just to save herself. But for her whole family? Of course she went.

  Alex and Jacques had tried to save their family by going to war. Henri would do his part through his work. The only option open to Sara was the one that countless women had been forced to take before her: marry someone she did not love. It is the traditional form of female sacrifice, so common that it was considered at the time expected and unremarkable. What would have been extraordinary, in the eyes of those around her then, was if she’d refused to do it.

  But how did she explain any of this to her fiancé? Did she say goodbye at all, or just disappear for good? How do you tell the love of your life, with whom you’re planning a life, that you’re leaving him to marry someone you’ve barely met? Her photo album, of her life in France in the 1930s, is a wordless yet eloquent testimony of not what she said, but how she felt about leaving behind her love and her life. At some point, she diligently went through it and either tore out whole photos and ripped them up or, with her thumbnail, scored out the faces of the people in the pictures so she wouldn’t have to remember them (she carefully left photos of Henri, Sonia, Jacques and Alex alone – she didn’t have to forget them). Someone picked up some of the pieces, glued them back together and stuck them in the album. Initially I assumed it was Sara, having remorsefully mended her photos after destroying them in a fit of high emotion. But my father said it was most likely his father, ‘walking behind her and picking up the pieces of the photos and taping them together as quickly as she could destroy them’. Her husband always thought she was so beautiful, it pained him to see any photos of her destroyed. And then, after her rage had passed and she saw her photos restored, she saved them in her shoebox, where they were safe but she didn’t have to look at them. But whoever did the repairing couldn’t – or didn’t – replace the faces she had gouged out, so in several photos my grandmother is standing in Paris, smiling happily, holding the arm of a man with no face – a ghost, a vanished past.

  On 3 June 1937 she sailed on the SS Manhattan from Le Havre to New York, on a ticket Bill sent over for her. ‘Sara Rykfa Glass, draftsman’ was how she was described on the passenger list, and in the box for nationality someone wrote ‘Polish’ only to cross that out and write ‘Heb’ – ‘Hebrew’. As in Poland, her Jewishness was now seen as more relevant than her born nationality. As she sailed off, she watched France fade away, the only place she’d ever been happy. She had nothing to think about over the week-long journey but what she had left behind.

  Bill met Sara at the dock. He had a big smile on his face; she did not, but she was relieved that at least the Kellermans weren’t with him. They got in his car and as they drove she focused on the sights around her, trying to familiarise herself with this new land she was expected to call home: the cars, the clothes, the advertisements on billboards in a language she did not understand. Next to her, Bill chattered away in Yiddish over the noise of the engine, and when she finally focused on what he was saying, she realised a couple of things pretty quickly: he was not a millionaire, he did not live on Park Avenue and he did not work in the fashion industry. It turned out he barely knew Alex at all. He lived in Farmingdale, Long Island, where he ran a Texaco gas station. Alex had completely lied to her, and the few sketchy images she’d had of her life in the States – living in the city, sharing a life with someone as interested in fashion as her – dissolved into nothing. Instead, she would be living in the middle of what was essentially nowhere, with a man whose life had no connection to her interests and passions at all. But it was too late to go back, because as soon as she accepted Bill’s ticket and got on the ship her fate was fixed. Two weeks to the day after her ship docked in New York, she became Mrs William Freiman.

  IN PARIS, Sara had found a city that encouraged her aspirations and inspired her every day with its beauty. Farmingdale, Long Island, was not Paris. Back in 1937 most of the town’s businesses were located on Main Street: the pharmacy, the hardware store, the bank. Kids rode their bicycles up and down it all day in the summer, swerving around cars parked diagonally in front of glass-fronted stores. People lived on side streets and dead-ends in identical two-storey houses, most of which had an American flag either affixed to the roof or on a pole in the front lawn. There was a cinema in the town but that was mainly for the kids. When the adults wanted entertainment, they would go to one another’s houses for supper and gossip about their neighbours. It was called Farmingdale, Long Island, but it was really Small Town, America.

  Farmingdale was formed by a series of early twentieth-century American phenomena. New York, uniquely in the United States back then, had excellent train lines and, as a result, the city was one of the earliest examples of urban flight, with people increasingly moving out of the city and commuting in to work. The American suburbs started to emerge, as immigrants who had arrived in New York in the late nineteenth century realised in the early twentieth century that instead of living in dirty and diseased tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan they could instead move to comparatively bright and spacious houses outside the city. Suburbia is often depicted as quintessential Americana but in many cases it was least partly moulded by immigrants, and Farmingdale was, by the time Sara arrived, largely populated by second-generation working-class German and Italian immigrants, who might not have spoken English at home, but firmly considered themselves to be American. Just as the suburbs were starting to boom in eastern Long Island, the American aviation industry arrived. Long Island was a natural airfield: situated on the west of the Atlantic, close but
not too close to one of America’s biggest cities, with large flat plains for take-offs and landings. When Charles Lindbergh made his famous transatlantic flight in 1927, he took off from Roosevelt Field, 13 miles from Farmingdale. This was the golden age of the American aviation industry and thriving aircraft companies, such as Liberty, Grumman, Republic, Ranger and Fairchild, needed a huge number of workers. This coaxed yet more people out of the city and into the Long Island suburbs. By the mid-1930s, Farmingdale’s population had doubled in twenty years to 3,500.

  So Farmingdale looked very American and was shaped by American social shifts. But Sara would also have found it in some ways grimly reminiscent of Chrzanow. Whereas Chrzanow’s name came from the Polish word for horseradish, Farmingdale’s original name was the similarly prosaic Hardscrabble. By the 1930s, it was populated by working-class Catholics and Jews and when Sara arrived it was, despite the nearby aircraft manufacturers, still a largely rural community; many of her neighbours were potato farmers. And while there obviously weren’t pogroms in Farmingdale, there were other problems.

  ‘There was also a lot of racism in the town,’ William Rappaport, who ran Farmingdale’s pharmacy back then, told me. ‘The John Birch Society had a big presence in Farmingdale, especially during the war. There were marches, meetings and open anti-Semitism. And that made the Jewish community especially tight-knit.’

  Alongside the racism, there was, Rappaport said, a suspicion of ‘difference’: ‘Aspirations, cultural interests, all these were seen as weird, and anything that made you different was weird. So even though the city was just a train ride away, no one would think of going there to see a museum or play. You might go to Brooklyn to see relatives, but that was it. Even reading the New York Times was a sign of over-intellectualism,’ he smiled. Instead, people were expected to read the local paper, the Farmingdale Post.

  As in Chrzanow, another small town, there was a feeling that what Farmingdale had to offer should suffice, and anyone who wanted more was getting above themselves, and nothing was worse than that. There were few places less suited to a young Francophile with a love of culture and beauty, and with ambitions for a glamorous, fulfilled life than Farmingdale, 1937.

  When I visited Farmingdale on a hot spring day, I was struck by how similar it felt to Chrzanow still. Both are pleasant and clean, with pretty streets and friendly people. But it has not been easy for small towns to adjust to the twenty-first century, and on the day I was there Farmingdale felt as silent as an abandoned ranch in an old Western, even on a weekday afternoon. There were vacant shop fronts, and the family-run stores had been crushed by the big chains and out-of-town shopping centres. While there are still some aviation companies in Long Island, many such as Grumman have long since closed down. With big cities just down the road (Krakow for Chrzanow, Manhattan for Farmingdale), how do you stop the young people leaving as soon as possible, desperate for something to do other than hang out on the same streets they’ve been hanging out on since they were kids? When I left and returned to the nearby cities where I was staying, it was like slipping from a faded sepia photo into a three-dimensional film. And that’s how it must’ve felt, in reverse, for Sara, arriving in Farmingdale from Paris eighty years earlier.

  Farmingdale was waiting for her when she arrived, and not especially warmly.

  ‘Everyone knew about Bill’s French bride long before she turned up,’ said William Rappaport.

  Given how little Bill himself knew about her, their knowledge of Sara was presumably limited to the fact that she was French and she was to be his bride. This was more than enough for them.

  ‘What’s wrong with American girls? They not good enough for you, Bill?’ people asked him.

  ‘If you didn’t find anything you wanted in Farmingdale, couldn’t you have just gone to New York?’ others asked.

  Some were simply so stumped as to why handsome Bill would marry a Frenchwoman they assumed he must have got her pregnant while he was in Paris. She was probably one of those kinds of Frenchwomen.

  And these questions did not stop once Sara arrived in this strange, unfamiliar small town. People asked them of Bill in front of Sara, taking it for granted she wouldn’t understand, and not really caring if she did. And soon enough she did understand, because she was good at languages. She heard them muttering about how her husband had had many lady friends, and maybe he still did, maybe that’s why he went into the city so much, and she heard them talking about how unfriendly she seemed, how snooty, how superior.

  And she probably was snooty or, more accurately, aloof. She realised that none of these people were interested in art, or fashion, or culture – all the things that represented to her high-mindedness, sophistication. These people, it seemed to her, were little different from the Polish peasants. Like her brothers Henri and Alex, she felt that a lack of aspiration was an admission of a lack of soul. Only those who are dead inside fail to want more than the little half-inch of life they’ve been given.

  But Sara was also shy and sad, and these are often mistaken for snobbishness. Talking about her snobbishness was a convenient smokescreen for the simple fact that none of her neighbours wanted to be friends with Sara, because she was a foreigner, even though most of them had immigrant parents themselves. But then, they wanted to be American and she did not. She would never be one of them, because she didn’t want to be.

  ‘She was a French lady in a rough Long Island town,’ my father’s cousin Ann Horowitz, who grew up in Farmingdale, told me. ‘She wasn’t ever really going to be accepted.’

  She tried to make a life there: she decorated her and Bill’s home as beautifully as she could in Farmingdale, and breakfast and dinner were always on the table on time for him. She would go for walks and get to know the town. But days would go by when she wouldn’t speak to anyone but her husband. And on days when he didn’t come home, she spoke to no one.

  Bill’s family were the only people who talked to Sara, as they could talk to her in Yiddish. They all lived close by: his mother Rose, who lived with them part of the time, his older brothers Jack and Mike, and his younger sisters, Rita and Sadie. The few surviving children of Bill’s siblings, all of whom are at least in their seventies now, stressed to me how much their parents liked Sara: how pretty they all thought she was, how kind they thought she was, and how protective they were of her when they felt Bill wasn’t treating her right.

  This may all be true, but it wasn’t how it seemed to Sara. When my parents got engaged in 1974, Sara arranged to meet up with my mother, her daughter-in-law-to-be, for the first time. As soon as they were sitting down she spoke, in a terrible emotional rush, of how Bill’s family had bullied her when she arrived in the States: they made fun of her accent, she said, of her love of art, and of her interest in clothes. ‘Why are you interested in that?!’ she recalled them sneering at her. For almost forty years she’d been waiting for a female relative in whom she could confide the pain she’d felt on her arrival in America, and it had festered inside her for decades.

  Maybe Bill’s siblings did like her, but just didn’t know how to reach out to her, or were bewildered by how different she was from them. And maybe she was just too homesick to understand them. But if she felt alienated from her in-laws that was nothing compared with how she felt about her husband.

  Bill was kind – Alex hadn’t lied about that, at least – and he really did love her. That turned out to be true, too. He loved to show off his French bride – so beautiful, so classy – but as far as he was concerned, he’d brought her over, provided her with a little house on Cornelia Street, and she could figure out the rest. He’d done her this incredible favour, rescuing her from Europe – what on earth did she have to complain about? But she did complain. She wasn’t nearly as grateful to him as he thought she would be.

  In another world their marriage could have worked because, in many ways, they were well matched: they both had religious parents but weren’t religious themselves, and they both had dreams of a better life tha
n the ones they were born into. But theirs was a match that was forged in lies and impulse, and forced into being by politics and circumstance. It would have been a miracle if it had worked, and neither of their families dealt in miracles.

  Sara looked at this American, with his coarse jokes and coarser Yiddish, the way assimilated Jews in Paris looked at people like Chaya and the rest of the Pletzl: didn’t he understand he was supposed to hide those parts of himself? Didn’t he want to improve his social standing, and not be seen as just another working-class Jew? And didn’t he understand that his behaviour reflected negatively on her, by association? For Sara, Paris had been her step forward, and this American had pulled her back to a life she thought she’d left behind. Bill was smart, so he sensed how she felt, and it hurt him.

  And, most of all, she wanted to be with someone else.

  ‘Your mother left her heart in Paris with that dental student,’ Sonia later told Sara’s sons.

  The fights started not long after they got married. They got worse when Bill revealed that he wasn’t going to help bring the rest of her family over from Paris, because it would cost too much. Sara was devastated: the only reason she had married Bill was because she thought it would get her family out of France, and they would be with her in America. But from Bill’s perspective, he was the wronged party here. He had certainly not been told that paying for all his in-laws to come over was part of the deal – in fact, according to Sonia, Alex had promised to support Bill for the rest of his life if he married Sara. But Bill understood sooner than Sara that the promises Alex made during this whole episode didn’t amount to much. Bill was able to shrug off such things; Sara, however, was crushed. She was stuck and now she really was alone. She had given up everything for something that was worse than nothing.

  Sara was desperately unhappy. Just how unhappy is apparent from looking at the passenger lists of ships between New York and France between 1937 and 1938. In November 1937, five months after she first arrived in the United States, she went back to Paris, presumably using the return ticket Bill had promised her. She returned to New York one month later, but six months later she made another return trip. Six months after that, in November 1938, she went back again. She returned to New York a month later. On none of those trips was she accompanied by Bill.