House of Glass Page 2
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 hom
e 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.