House of Glass Read online

  But as is often the case with events that feel specific to us in the moment, the Glasses’ move was wholly typical of both their time and their demographic. Between 1880 and 1925, 3.5 million Jews left central and eastern Europe and 100,000 of them went to France,[1],[2] most for exactly the same reasons as the Glasses: they were fleeing the pogroms, and they knew people in Paris. Between 1900 and 1935, the number of Jews in France tripled,[3] and by the end of that decade Paris had the third largest Jewish community in the world, surpassed only by New York and Warsaw.[4] So not only were Jews likely to feel at home there, but they were also likely to have relatives there who would help them settle in, as the Glasses did. New York was too far away for many eastern European immigrants, and Warsaw too close to the danger from which they were fleeing, so Paris was the logical third option. Even more appealing for immigrants in the 1920s was that, at this point, France – unlike the United States or the United Kingdom[5] – had never imposed an anti-immigration statute that capped the number of (primarily Jewish) immigrants allowed in. Instead the country was known as une terre d’asile (a nation of asylum), and as a result, by the late 1930s, Paris had a Jewish population of 150,000, of whom 90,000 were immigrants from eastern Europe, including 50,000 Poles.[6] France, these Jews imagined, would be their salvation, away from pogroms and rampaging peasants. There was even a popular Yiddish phrase suggesting as much: lebn vi Got in Frankrykk[7] (live like a king in France). Although seeing as there was a similar phrase about Poland, describing it as a Pardisus Judeorum (a Jewish paradise),[8] the Polish Jews at least ought to have known better than to put too much faith in old Yiddish sayings.

  France’s appeal to fleeing Jewish immigrants went deeper than mere pragmatic considerations. In 1791 it became the first country in western Europe to liberate Jews[9] and so was associated in many Jews’ minds with liberalism and tolerance. Immigrant Jews weren’t especially bothered by the Dreyfus Affair,[10] the notorious case in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was accused of passing confidential French military documents to the Germans and was unanimously found guilty by seven judges of treason in 1894. He was finally exonerated in 1906 after another (non-Jewish) Frenchman, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was proven to be the culprit. The French Army had mounted a massive cover-up to obscure Dreyfus’s innocence and, more than a century on, the case remains one of the most notorious examples of anti-Semitism. Many eastern European Jews at the time, however, saw it differently. At least, they reasoned, in France these arguments happen in the public sphere, an improvement on what they saw in their own countries, where their relatives and friends were lynched and dumped.

  ‘We saw the Dreyfus Affair as part of history, and touching only on a part of the populace, the military. It seemed to us a sort of literary anti-Semitism, the product of old, reactionary fanatics. What had really touched us was the Beilis Affair. For us poor Jews, the Beilis Affair had a terrifying resonance when the pogroms began, because it seemed like it could happen anywhere,’ Sender wrote, referring to the vehemently anti-Semitic 1911 case in Russia, in which Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Hasidic Jew, was falsely accused of killing a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy, and the murder was associated with the blood libel. West, in other words, was infinitely preferable to east.

  And in the main, France was happy to have the Jews. After the Dreyfus Affair, which exposed systemic French anti-Semitism under the shaming bright lights of publicity, anti-Jewish feelings subsided.[11] The anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole, which once had a circulation of over 300,000 copies, folded, and even Maurice Barrès, one of the leaders of the anti-Semitic right at the end of the nineteenth century and during the Dreyfus Affair, wrote in his 1917 essay, ‘Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France’, that Jews should be considered one of France’s ‘spiritual families’ because of their courage during the war.

  But there was a practical element to France’s embrace of Jews as well as a moral one: 1.4 million Frenchmen died in the First World War, and the country desperately needed workers. So much so that in 1927 the Naturalisation Act was introduced, reducing the requirement for naturalisation from ten years to three, making it even easier, and quicker, to get immigrants into jobs.[12] The eastern European immigrants were shunted into industries that were seen as Jewish, such as the textile and garment trades, furniture-making and watch and jewellery repair. Most of these were based in or near the Marais, the Parisian quarter that was once chic but had become something of a ghetto. Just a few years before the Glass family arrived, New York’s Yiddish newspaper Der Forverts ran an article about the Marais: ‘The alleys are frightfully dirty, the houses mostly old ruins … Without exaggeration one can find from twelve to fifteen persons living in two small rooms … The largest and best room serves as the atelier; one eats where one can and sleeps in a dark hole without a window.’[13] This was where many immigrants settled, and it was so popular with Jewish immigrants it became known as the ‘Pletzl’ – Yiddish for ‘little place’.

  Jakob was the first to arrive in Paris, when he was just eighteen years old, and he adhered so faithfully to the trends of his demographic that the outlines of his story at times veer towards textbook. He rented a small flat near the Pletzl, on rue de Cléry, because it was close to his Ornstein cousins, and he got work as a furrier in the Pletzl, not because he knew anything about fur but because his cousin Josek, the second-oldest Ornstein, worked in the fur trade and helped him find a job. Jakob spent his days in the Pletzl, tending to animal skins in a darkened room, and he loved the simplicity of his work and life. In the Pletzl he could live as he had always done, surrounded by Poles and Yiddish speakers. If he never left his neighbourhoods, and there was rarely any need to do so, he barely had to remember he had left Chrzanow at all.

  Sender, however, felt very differently. The fourteen-year-old arrived not long after Jakob, on a train full of other eastern European immigrants. His clothes and speech immediately marked him as a foreigner, so he was shunned by the French commuters around him as he walked through the train station. It was there that he saw and learned his first French word: ‘sortie’ (exit). Following Jakob’s instructions, he caught a bus from the station and stared out of the window in astonishment at the beauty of Paris. His occasional trips to the dentist in Trzebina hadn’t prepared him for anything like this. He stared out of the bus window at the elegant architecture and even more elegant people in gleeful amazement. When he arrived at his new neighbourhood next to the Pletzl his heart sank into his shoes. It looked to him like Jakob had found the one ugly part of Paris, and was making him live there. He walked through the dirty and noisy streets looking for rue de Cléry, and when he saw Jakob’s poky flat, he understood how little Jakob had changed his life, whereas Sender had come here to change everything. He also grasped that he was expected to become a traditional immigrant Jewish tailor like his brother and beloved Ornstein cousins, but he knew that he would never, ever do that. He loved few people more than Jakob, and no one more than his father, but he looked at their lives of drudgery, and although there was a part of him that admired their humility, he knew life had more to offer, and he would grab it. Jakob and Reuben expected nothing from life; Sender demanded everything. He had not come all this way to continue living like a Polish peasant. Despite having had such a circumscribed childhood, Sender’s ambitions were boundless, and from what his father had always told him, and what he had seen on his bus ride to the Pletzl, he knew Paris could provide what he sought. In his memoir he wrote:

  In Paris there was such gaiety. It dazzled the eyes. In Paris, on the terraces of the great restaurants, people drank wine and were happy. It was the image of happiness on earth. ‘This life is impossible. It must be better, elsewhere’: these words turned in my head during the long Chrzanow nights. So, it was true. Life could be marvellous. Paris is where I was reborn.

  After rejecting the life of a tailor, spending his days sitting on a bench in the Pletzl, Sender decided to be a couturier. He wanted his name above
the door of his own salon, like those he saw on his daily walks around the city, when he eagerly escaped the Pletzl to explore the ritzier neighbourhoods around rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and Place Vendôme. Lanvin, Schiaparelli, Vionnet, Patou: that’s who he wanted to be like, not just another Jewish tailor. There was, however, a small problem: he didn’t even know how to sew on a button.

  Not for a second did Sender see this as a possible impediment to becoming a world-famous fashion designer. If anything, that it was such an unlikely path for him to choose only made him more determined to succeed. So, undaunted, he found a job as an apprentice at a garment workshop where he learned how to cut, sew and drape while working twenty-four-hour shifts. And when he finished a shift he came back to his and Jakob’s flat and practised sewing for another twenty-four hours. It infuriated him that he was so bad at it, and his anger drove him to work harder: he wouldn’t, he explained to his bemused brother, stop until he became good. His cousin Josek was one of the few who understood his ambitions, because, like Sender, Josek was smart, but he considered himself too smart to take such an absurd risk as trying to be a couturier, whereas Sender felt he was too smart not to.

  ‘Life,’ he wrote, ‘was not going to pass me by any more.’

  Over the next few years, while Sala and Chaya stayed in Chrzanow with Reuben, and Jehuda continued his studies in Prague, Jakob worked quietly as a furrier in the Pletzl and Sender, then in his mid-teens, threw himself into couture and Paris life. He slogged his way through the workshops and got apprenticeships with small couturiers around the Saint-Martin neighbourhood, making a name for himself as an exceptionally hard worker and a perfectionist.

  Couture might seem like an odd career path for one who used to relax by getting into brawls in the streets of Chrzanow. But what fashion meant to Sender was beauty, and beauty represented the opposite of Poland. It was a bulwark against the suffering he saw his father endure. He wrote:

  In my little Chrzanow world, there were no paintings at all, no beauty. But I always felt a growing hunger inside me for it, and I arrived in Paris famished for this beauty. Different from other immigrants who came to France mainly to earn money, I wished to educate myself constantly, to continue the Jewish traditions but also to open myself to French culture. I participated in the life of the country. Everywhere I went something new was happening, and I hurried to make up for lost time. I wanted to know everything, to devour life like a man eating a big chunk of meat.

  While he spent his weekdays learning how to make beautiful clothes, he spent his weekends and nights learning how to make a beautiful world. Jakob liked to hang out at the cafés in the Pletzl with his cousins and other Jewish tailors. Sender was not averse to cafés, but he wanted to find a new life, not cling to his old one. Not long after he arrived in Paris he met Marc Chagall, who was already an established artist, at Café Koretz, a small hangout for Yiddish speakers in the Pletzl with only five or six tables. Over dishes of stuffed carp, cake and tea, the two would talk about politics and share memories of their home towns that still haunted them both. It was through Chagall that Sender became aware of modern art and artists, and he was soon spending his weekends at the Musée du Luxembourg, then Paris’s only museum of modern art. When Sender invited his brother to come with him at weekends to look at the Cézannes and Monets, or to look in the windows of the French couturiers on the Grands Boulevards, Jakob would wave him away.

  ‘We don’t know anything about painting, why would we spend our weekends doing that? Let’s have fun instead,’ he’d say. And when Sender stormed off towards the Louvre on his own, Jakob would head to his local café to see his friends, all of whom were also Jewish immigrants, to read the Yiddish newspapers, to drink, to joke, to do nothing.

  So Sender looked elsewhere for like-minded companionship. Through Chagall, he became increasingly close to artists who, like Chagall and himself, were Jewish refugees, such as Jules Pascin and Moïse Kisling, known to his friends as Kiki. These three artists – Chagall, Pascin and Kisling – were part of the École de Paris, a term coined by a critic to refer to the sudden influx of immigrant artists who had all, for reasons very similar to Sender, washed up in Paris in the interwar period. (‘École de France’, on the other hand, referred to French-born artists, who tended to be more traditional stylistically and they somewhat resented the attention these new avant-garde foreigners got from the art critics.) They were all several decades older than Sender, and it’s likely that Sender, the fatherless teenager in a new strange land, saw them as paternal figures. Chagall would refer to Sender fondly as ‘our youngest friend’ and if he was ever away too long from the cafés, because he was working so hard, one of the artists would come looking for him, bringing a cup of soup in case he was ill. For the first time in Sender’s life, he had friends.

  By 1925, Sender had earned enough from his apprenticeships to be able to send money for Chaya and Sala to come and join them in Paris after Reuben died. They initially lived with him and Jakob on rue de Cléry, four people crowded into a studio flat barely big enough for one. Like Jakob, Chaya loved the Pletzl for its reassuring familiarity. The local bakeries sold challah, not croissants. The Polish synagogue was only a few yards away. Chaya had managed to move halfway across Europe without changing her daily life a jot, and in all the years she lived in Paris she never learned a single French word. Chaya had never trusted outsiders anyway, and after her experiences in Chrzanow, she believed if the French didn’t see her they wouldn’t hurt her.

  But while Chaya and Jakob felt similarly about the Pletzl, Sala shared Sender’s feelings about Paris. After living for so long in fear in pogrom-torn Chrzanow, its beauty amazed her, and although as a sickly teenage girl she was largely stuck inside, she longed to explore the city like her older brother. Sender had never paid much attention to his sister before, but when she arrived in Paris she was a fifteen-year-old beauty who looked, Sender realised, not unlike the models in the fashion magazines he had taken to buying whenever he had spare change. She had wavy dark hair, high cheekbones and large round eyes, and her family later said they seemed to get bigger in Paris as she tried to take in everything around her. Of equal interest to Sender was the fact that she idolised him, making her his only sibling who took his dreams seriously. When Sender had a day off, and if Sala was feeling well enough, he would take her with him around the city, and the two Polish teenagers walked together down the Grands Boulevards, staring through the big windows of the fashion salons, looking at the elegant French ladies choosing fabrics while the couturiers bowed and flattered them. Decades later Sala would describe those walks to her family, still audibly thrilling at the memory of seeing such elegance, and being with her brother.

  Sender also took her to the museums and introduced her to art, which she had never seen before in her life. Sometimes he would also take some of his Ornstein cousins, in particular his favourites Josek and Alex, one tough like him and the other sweet-tempered and easy-going. (All his life, Sender was drawn to two types of men: either tough competitive men like himself and Josek, or calm and gentle ones like Jehuda, Jakob and Alex Ornstein.) He showed them his favourite designers and artworks, because the parts of Sender’s character that he felt he had to suppress to get ahead in the world he expressed through art and fashion. He told his sister that he loved the Impressionists because ‘of their femininity’. When they went to the Musée du Luxembourg together Sender would stand for hours in front of a Monet painting.

  ‘This fills my soul with delight,’ he told her.

  Sala’s soul was also delighted by Paris, with all its beauty, art and fashion. Her weak lungs, however, suffered wretchedly in the dirty Pletzl. Jehuda arrived in Paris later that year after a brief period in Danzig, following his studies in Prague, where he worked as an engineer to make some money, and when he heard his sister’s chronic cough he took charge. For the next half-decade Sala was in and out of sanatoriums that her eldest brother found for her up in the mountains, physically recovering but ment
ally rotting in lonely solitude, time and life drifting away. They were isolating and disorienting, these giant white buildings up in the sky, so far from her new home and even further from her old home, too far for any of her family to come and visit her. They did, however, make her better and the doctors finally put a name to her suffering: she had pleurisy, an inflammation of the tissue layers in the lungs, and although they couldn’t cure it yet, the rest and clean air began to soothe the pains in her chest she’d had so long she assumed they were simply part of the human condition. Until, one day, they lifted, and it was like clearing dirt from her eyes. Life didn’t have to be obscured by pain after all.

  Jehuda’s feelings about Paris were much closer to Sala’s and Sender’s than Chaya’s and Jakob’s: as soon as he arrived he knew this city was home, because it didn’t feel like his old home. The elegance of the people and architecture, the delicious food, even the waiters with their short vests and white aprons looked impossibly chic to him as they carried thin-stemmed glasses of wine to their patrons: it was all so different from the unrelenting drabness of Chrzanow, and he loved it all.

  Jehuda was known in his family as the intellectual one, but he was also deeply aesthetic. He’d always loved western culture, especially the art, and as a student in Krakow he proudly if somewhat eccentrically wore a chimney sweep’s hat, as tall as a stovepipe, much to his brother Jakob’s bemusement and his brother Sender’s admiration. Fashion allowed this shy young man to carve out some self-expression, and it wasn’t until he got to France that this expression found its shape and flow.

  Initially he stayed in a tiny one-room flat near the rest of his family on a loud and busy main road. Almost as soon as he arrived, he told his siblings they should all change their Polish names to the French equivalents, just as he once urged his father to change their surname. Jehuda understood, as he had known in Chrzanow, that shucking off their heavy Yiddish and Polish labels would only ease his and his siblings’ paths in life, and this was when the young people born Jehuda, Jakob, Sender and Sala Glahs became Jules, Jacques, Alex and Sara Glass. Unfortunately, Jehuda hated the westernised version of his name, ‘Jules’, as he thought it pretentious, a quality he abhorred above all. So he found what felt like a legitimate way around this rule of his own making by adopting the French version of his middle name, Henoch. He could be who he wanted, but within certain self-imposed parameters, and so he became Henri. It sounded respectable and French to him and he liked it so much he instantly made the change official: in 1926 he received a certificate from l’Administration Supérieure Confessionnelle Israélite de la Paroisse stating ‘Jehuda Henoch Glass shall hereon be known as Jules Henri Glass.’