House of Glass Page 16

  When President Trump arrived in office in 2017 and issued an executive order that he himself referred to on Twitter as a ‘Muslim ban’, barring the citizens of seven Muslim countries from entering the United States for a period of ninety days. (He had previously, in 2015, during the presidential campaign, called for ‘a complete and total shutdown’ of the country’s borders to Muslims, and suggested establishing a government database of all American Muslims, not unlike the 1940 French census of Jews.) Many people – politicians, journalists, Nobel laureates, leaders of Jewish organisations – described the so-called ban as ‘un-American’. But it was only un-American in as much as what America should be; in regard to what America actually is, it was all too American, and Trump comes from a long line of white men who have set out to make America racist again. President Trump was not the first or even most successful American politician to set out to ban Muslims from the country, and this is a shameful truth about a country that was founded by immigrants for immigrants. But one of the wonderful things about America is there are always people who resist, and people in the 1920s made many of the same points about Johnson that people in 2017 made about President Trump. Dr I. Mortimer Bloom, rabbi of the Hebrew Tabernacle of West 116th Street, said this at the time:

  The immigration restriction bills are a denial and a reversal of long-cherished American ideals and traditions, an affront to the memory of the founders of the Republic, a dagger thrust into the hearts of thousands of human beings who yearn for an opportunity to lead the normal decent life which their own lands deny them and a staggering blow to humanitarians everywhere … Not as a Jew, not as one whose co-religionists happen to be seriously affected by the proposed legislation, but as an American steeped in the best traditions of his land, an American who craves for his country to be true to the high and holy mission for which she was called into being, do I cry against these discriminatory, heartless, un-American bills.

  With hardly any alterations, Rabbi Bloom’s words could have run as an editorial in the New York Times or Washington Post almost a hundred years later, and would have looked completely in tune with the times.

  Throughout the 1920s, families like the Freimans were moving out of the Lower East Side, and fewer and fewer Jewish immigrants were coming in to replace them. Although the neighbourhood would remain the centre of Yiddish-speaking life in America, the Jews themselves were being absorbed across the city. Grant might have succeeded in restricting Jews coming into the United States, but he resoundingly failed to make New York any less racially mixed, let alone less Jewish. Any politician who thinks he can ethnically cleanse America would do themselves a favour by learning their history.

  As Annie Pollard and Daniel Soyer wrote in their book about New York’s immigrant Jews, Emerging Metropolis:

  New York had already become in some senses a ‘Jewish city’. At nearly a third of the population, Jews were New York’s largest single ethnic group, and they profoundly influenced the city’s culture, politics and economy. Of course, the city shaped them as well. This was especially true of the second generation, those born and raised in New York, who in the 1920s came into their own as the dominant segment of the community. Jewish immigrants laid the foundation for the Jewish metropolis. Their American-born children and grandchildren built on that groundwork for the remainder of the 20th century.[20]

  But this assimilation wasn’t entirely straightforward. Ritzier neighbourhoods across America barred Jews and in the 1920s prestigious universities, such as Harvard and Yale, introduced stiflingly restrictive quotas on the number of Jewish students.[21] As in France, in the United States the Great Depression then led to a rise in open anti-Semitism; in the 1930s it was the norm in the country’s private school systems to have a quota on the number of Jewish students admitted, and the same went for medical and law schools. Meanwhile Christian applicants were specified in advertisements for white-collar jobs.[22] It was a blatant attempt by America’s elite to stop the assimilation of Jews of Bill’s generation, the children of immigrants who arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century, and further proof of how close America and France were in their attitudes towards Jewish immigrants between the two world wars, and how differently things could have gone in both countries, had they simply had different leaders.[23]

  Sara, Bill and Ronald.

  By the time the Freimans had moved out to Farmingdale, most of the children had, like the Glasses, tweaked their names: Michael, Yakov, Sarah, Moses and Rivka became Mike, Jack, Sadie, Bill and Rita. Bill, more than the rest of his siblings, was ambitious to make his mark and rise, not just stay for the rest of his life in the Jewish community within Farmingdale.

  ‘Bill always liked to show off, to impress, whereas the others didn’t want to draw attention to themselves so much,’ Herb, Mike’s son, told me. ‘And in the end, he would be the only one to make a relative success of himself, and to get out.’

  Throughout the day I spent with Herb, who was in his eighties by then, and Ann, who was in her seventies, both of them were checking their phones constantly, watching the stock market. Ann had once been a trader on Wall Street, which is where my father worked, too, and that’s probably why he remained in touch with her; of his other many cousins, including Herb, I never heard anything.

  ‘How much did you make, Ann? You selling?’ Herb would occasionally shout out. He loved it; over his lifetime, he had made an impressive amount of money on the stock market, as proven by his large and stylish house. Ann, too, had done well.

  But their parents did not have Bill’s drive to get out, and get away. Of that generation, only Bill aimed for the golden ring. In 1937 when he went to Paris, he owned a Texaco petrol station in what was then a plum location in Farmingdale, opposite the Republic Aviation manufacturing plant. But he was always cooking up more plans, and his various careers would eventually include making glassware, working as a subcontractor for the military, selling industrial fabrics, working as a stockbroker and a real estate agent. He was indefatigable, because he knew he didn’t want to just sit on the porch every night, gossiping about the Farmingdale neighbours, and that was why he was still single at thirty-five: he didn’t want another Long Island girl. He wanted something different, someone who would show him another kind of life.

  When Bill saw Sara in her apartment on that winter’s night in 1937, he thought he’d found what he was looking for. She was unlike all the girls he knew at home – she talked about art, and clothes, and style. With her by his side, he wouldn’t live the kind of life his siblings did. She would lift him up. Even better, she was a woman who needed rescuing, and ever since he was a child he had been rescuing women, most obviously his mother. So this was a dynamic that felt very familiar to him. But to his shock, it turned out she didn’t want to be rescued. Worse, she saw him as a coarse American who dragged her down. Deeply hurt, he would occasionally be cruel to her, telling her he’d been tricked into marrying ‘damaged goods’ because of her weak lungs. Sara withdrew from him even further. In many ways, they were similar, in terms of their backgrounds and their aspirations. But Sara didn’t want someone who was like her – she wanted someone different. For the rest of Bill’s life, he would only want her. In his eyes, she would always be the beautiful French girl he saw in that dark apartment. But there wasn’t anything he could do to make her love him like he loved her.

  Going clockwise from the top: Bill, Alex, Richard and Ronald in the US, mid-1940s.

  Whereas Sara was changed irrevocably by her unhappy marriage, Bill was made of tougher stuff. Even when he was ninety, he would joke around with people and call up my father to talk about the stock exchange, always looking for good business opportunities. He never stopped fighting for a better life. Whatever sadness he felt about Sara not reciprocating his love, he proudly hid it from those around him with good humour and inexhaustible energy.

  Herb was the same. As the day I spent with him wore on, I realised certain things in his life were more complicated than they looked –
a divorce here, serious health problems there – but he never let any of it dampen his mood. As it got later in the afternoon, one of his daughters quietly told me that her brother, Herb’s youngest son, had died in 9/11. As it happened, a friend of mine had also died in 9/11, and I was staying with her parents on this trip to the US, so I went over and told Herb how very sorry I was for the loss of his son, and about my friend. His face collapsed, like a tarpaulin that had its pole removed, and those bright blue eyes looked dull for a second. I felt like I’d reached into his chest, put my finger on the softest part of his heart, and stopped it.

  ‘Yeah, well …’ he began, his repartee stilled. ‘Yeah. Thank you.’

  As well as having the Freiman eyes, Herb had inherited the Freiman way of dealing with tragedy, which was to plough ever onwards, distracting himself instead of dwelling. The Glass tendency, by contrast, was to obsess privately about the past for ever.

  Bill and Sara would eventually leave Farmingdale. His siblings always thought it was Sara who pushed them away, but in truth it was Bill. He wanted to move forward. In Sara, he thought he saw someone who wanted to move forward with him, and he was half right about that: she did want to move forward, she just hadn’t wanted it to be with him. And as much as he was able to hide it, that was his tragedy.

  8

  HENRI AND SONIA – Denounced

  Paris, 1940–1943

  WHEN THE NAZIS marched into Paris on 14 June 1940, a beautiful bright sunny day, Henri and Sonia were in their flat on rue Victor-Cousin with the shutters tightly closed. Their neighbourhood was so quiet Sonia was sure she could hear the marching all the way over on the Champs-Élysées. The few Parisians who were still in town had, like Henri and Sonia, closed their shutters too, so they wouldn’t have to see the German uniforms swarming through their beautiful streets. But for Henri and Sonia, it was also because they didn’t want to be seen.

  The Nazis’ arrival was not a surprise. The French had been waiting for the Germans to attack Paris for weeks, and the reason Henri and Sonia’s neighbourhood was so quiet was that most of their neighbours had fled the city. Henri and Sonia refused to leave, partly because they couldn’t abandon Chaya and Mila, neither of whom was willing to go anywhere, and partly because they didn’t believe there was anywhere else for them to go. The road to the south was already clogged with people trying to get out, and there was no way Chaya could make that journey on foot. So they decided to stay where they were, in their beloved apartment. But as Sonia heard the jackboots, she knew they’d have to go into hiding.

  Up until that point, they had been cheerful about their life in Paris – or at least they pretended to be so for their relatives. One of Sonia’s cousins in Poland wrote to her in 1939.

  Hello dear Zosia,

  Do not hold a grudge against me that I do not write so often, although I think of you all the time. You must know the times we live in are not peaceful. Nothing happens here and if something bad happens nobody intervenes. I am sad when I realise that everything we believed in does not matter any more. It is only a symbol now … You are full of optimism, that should make me forget about my problems that stop me from sleeping. But all the news we hear suggests everything is worse than it was during the Great War.

  On 25 May 1940 Henri wrote what was probably his last letter to his sister before Paris fell, and he spent most of it telling her that everything was fine.

  My dear little sister,

  Just a word to reassure you that all is well with us. Don’t be frightened by what you read in the newspapers. Life in Paris proceeds calmly with full awareness of the gravity of the situation. We are calm and confident. I am showing my machines at a fair in Paris. There are not many visitors, of course, but the ones who are there are potential buyers.

  Mother is very well. I am not evacuating her. She will simply move to Mila’s house. This way she won’t be alone, Mila neither. And at Mila’s, being on the ground floor, she won’t be in any danger. Jacques and Alex are in the army and fine, the Ornsteins are all well, too. Write to us and don’t worry, I kiss you often as well as your Ronny. Hello Bill!

  Henri

  By the time Sara received the letter, Nazis were on the Champs-Élysées and a swastika flag was hanging from the Arc de Triomphe.

  How does a Polish Jewish couple live in Paris for the whole of the war and survive? And how could a woman as naturally attention-grabbing as Sonia live under the radar for four years, running away from her natural place in the sun to live in the shadows? Henri never spoke about their years in hiding. Sonia did, but she only ever told half the story. The other part of their story she kept to herself.

  Of the 200,000 Jews who lived in Paris when war started, more than half of whom were foreigners, it is estimated that, at most, only 10 per cent refused to register.[1] It is, for obvious reasons, impossible to know how many of those hidden Jews survived. But given they were Polish Jews, who stayed in Paris for the entire war and survived, there is no question that Henri and Sonia were exceptional.

  Once the Nazis arrived, Henri and Sonia’s relatively calm life ended. Most of the anti-Jewish legislation was passed during the first year of occupation, and Jews were banned from public places, travelling in certain cars on the metro, owning a bicycle, telephone or radio, and working in particular professions. They had to be home at specified hours and were allowed to shop only between three and four in the afternoon. Anti-Semitic posters appeared all around the city: ‘Il faut aussi balayer les JUIFS pour que notre maison soit propre,’ read a popular one (We must sweep away the Jews in order to keep our home clean). Between October 1940, when the anti-Jewish legislation kicked in, and December 1941, the number of known Jews in Paris fell by 18,000: 8,000 had been arrested and were interned as enemy aliens in French camps and 10,000 had vanished.[2] From June 1942, Jews had to wear a yellow star at all times so as to make it easier for the authorities to identify them and, imminently, deport them.

  Henri and Sonia never registered as Jews. Both of them foresaw the dangers ahead and Sonia, as usual, took charge. She figured out how to buy false identity cards on the black market which claimed they were a Christian German couple, called Classe. She also spoke German so fluently she could pass as a native, even to German officers, and Henri could get by. They then rented a tiny apartment on the Avenue des Minimes, under the name of Classe, and left almost everything back in their home on rue Victor-Cousin, so it would look to the police who came looking for the Jewish Glasses like they’d simply abandoned it.

  Henri and Sonia’s lives were saved by their identity cards but life in Paris under Nazi occupation was still crushingly difficult. The French had an easier time under occupation than the Polish, because the Nazis didn’t consider the French to be Untermenschen. But their beloved capital city soon became almost unrecognisable. Familiar buildings were now covered with Nazi flags; cinemas – which the French had always loved – were handed over to the Germans and, for example, the Rex Cinema on one of the Grands Boulevards was renamed Deutschen Soldatenkino (cinema for German soldiers). Swastikas decked all the great Parisian monuments and propaganda posters were everywhere, warning Parisians to fight against ‘le cancer du terrorisme communiste’ (the cancer of communist terrorism). With petrol almost impossible to come by, the only vehicles in the streets were German military ones, while the French made do with bicycles, the metro and their feet. French brasseries were renamed in German and the street signs were similarly redubbed. France’s humiliation was total. On the newsstands only papers approved by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, were on sale, such as the established far-right paper Le Matin which had eagerly become pro-Nazi, La Gerbe (the Sheaf) a pro-Nazi weekly rooted in racism, and Aujourd’hui, a once independent daily that became pro-Vichy and pro-Nazi.[3] After the war, the editors of some of these papers would be charged with treason, but during the occupation they were almost all that Parisians had to bring them news. While Parisians could see the Germans dining and living it up in the bra
sseries and the Ritz Hotel in Place Vendôme, they endured near-crippling rationing. The city, one inhabitant wrote at the time, was defined by ‘silence and misery’, and the rations were ‘barely sufficient to keep people alive provided they remain lying down and don’t work’.[4]

  Henri and Sonia fared better than many of their fellow Parisians. As well as feeding herself and Henri, Sonia looked after Mila and Chaya, and also managed to get enough food on the black market to send to her relatives back home, who then sent her thanks in return.

  5 April 1942

  My dearest Zosia,

  Yesterday I received parcel No5 containing 1 box of melted butter – nothing missing. Today I received 3 parcels together No1, No2 and No3 – there was between 80 and 100 grams missing in each of them.

  Sweet fruit cakes were all in bits and there were only 9 pieces of butter in a box.

  As the post office is not working I am sending this postcard by First Class. Last week they took lots of people from here. My cousin Azyasza H. (76 years old) was one of them. In November they took mum, grandmother and aunt. We are terrified every single day and nobody knows what happens in a couple of days. It is still a little bit cold here so we burn the fire every other day and we make wholemeal bread as there is lack of it.

  I am looking forward to hearing from you. I hope you are healthy.

  Lots of love,

  Lille Lemberg

  Some of her relatives spent as much time in their letters griping to Sonia about family spats as they did thanking her for her bravery and generosity. Not even living in fear of their lives can alter the nature of families.

  4 July 1942

  My dear Zosia,