Well I’ve had a wonderful August sabbatical with lots of reading, and I hope you have too, but it’s time we returned to talking about good books and today’s the day.
'If you don't know the past, you can't understand the present and plan properly for the future...'
Chaim Potok ( Davita's Harp)
It is years since I read Chaim Potok, but how well I remember My Name is Asher Lev, so I felt at least a mild connection with this quote from Hadley Freeman in her family memoir House of Glass.
I find anti-Semitism incomprehensible on a personal level...really so.
David, one of my closest friends, and also rivals, at my 1950's-into-the-1960's primary school was Jewish and I feel sure the competition between us was the making of us.
David and I shared a two-seater wooden table. We drew a line down the middle and the other person's elbow wasn't allowed to cross it. On the last day of term we all had to scrub our tables with Ajax ready for the next term. We'd draw the line again on day one and so we'd continue the Battle of the Elbows. David would sit in the classroom on his own while we all trooped in for our ultra-Christian assembly, explaining to me that Jewish people believed in God but just not the Jesus bit. That seemed to me like missing the best bits so I still sent him a Christmas card, yet to define him by even that small sign of difference was incomprehensible to us as children. His father was a GP; we, by comparison, were a very working class family, but there was never any sense of class or religious difference between us as children. We all just played together, learned together and were happy together.
Looking back I'm wondering if that was all about our respective parents forging a new life in post-war suburban Britain, but whatever the reason that lack of prejudice as a child has stayed with me into adulthood. Incidentally, David went on to become a consultant paediatrician, easily contactable online these days. I haven't, but one day maybe I might...it's the fear of the reply that says 'I don't remember you at all' isn't it, when your memories of them are so vivid.
Or perhaps that they remember it differently.
This is all by way of an introduction to my family memoir read of the year so far, because House of Glass is a book that made me willingly examine my own thinking and its origins, for which I think I owe my mum and dad and huge thank you.
The story and secrets of a twentieth century Jewish family was bound to yield some disturbing moments and I'll be honest, I usually find these accounts harder and harder to read the older I get.
Do we get more sensitive as we age...
Protect ourselves a little more from it all...
I know my capacity for reading or hearing about violence or torture is seriously limited these days.
But I had heard such good things about House of Glass that I decided to brave it and maybe long summer days, full of light, are the best time to read books like this. I sometimes think books like this are an absolute privilege to read. To be invited into the life of someone's family.
In any case I needn't have worried. Things do happen but Hadley Freeman doesn't need to describe in detail. She knows we know.
Sala, thin, quiet, melancholic and always immaculately dressed in the French chic style accompanies her five-year-old granddaughter Hadley, and her son and his wife, on a family holiday from their home in America to Deauville in France. The purpose has been to meet Sala’s family. But Hadley Freeman's exploration of her family history begins in earnest many years later on the discovery of a box of disparate objects, papers and photographs found in her grandmother's wardrobe after her death.
Originally from Poland, the Glass family had fled their native country in the aftermath of World War One, when their comfortable life amongst a solid Jewish community in Chrzanow was decimated by rising anti-semitism and the nation’s need for a scapegoat. The family wisely left for Paris in 1920; had they stayed in Poland they would inevitably have been among the 15,000 Jews in the town who were eventually rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Sala and her brothers Henri and Alex settle into a new life in France, and yet their safety is far from assured with the rise of Nazism and all that followed.
Much here is utterly heart-breaking...
The sense of trust that the Glass family placed in their fellow countrymen, first in Poland and then in France. They belonged, they worked hard, they contributed and yet that trust would be broken, betrayals would be manifold and in the midst of it all there is Sala, Hadley's grandmother. Whilst her brothers forged successful careers, the options for Sala were far more limited. Henri would invent a prototype photocopying machine much sought-after during the war and Alex would found his own haute couture fashion house.

Alex's story is fascinating, and in many ways as central to the book as Sala's, and if you enjoy the world of fashion history then you will certainly enjoy the details that Hadley Freeman has unearthed about her great uncle's work with an upcoming Christian Dior, and his life among the upper echelons of French society. Alex Maguy has an interesting war (to say the least) and when the world of haute couture starts to decline with the arrival of pret-a-porter fashion, he transfers his entrepreneurial skills into the world of art and makes even more of a success of that. Counting Picasso amongst his close friends the man himself would design a poster for one of Alex's select gallery exhibitions.

But weaving her way quietly throughout the book is Sala, and Hadley Freeman's exploration of the grandmother she always saw as someone concealing loss and anguish, but why. And here I don't want to give a single thing away beyond the fact that Sala will make what emerged for me as the single biggest sacrifice in the book. She is a woman, her choices are limited and ultimately barely her own to make...
The analysis of photographs long after the event reminded me of On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings and another book I read at about the same time The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes.. I didn't share thoughts on it at the time because I was so affected by it I honestly didn't think I could do it justice. That doesn't usually stop me trying but somehow did.
I now have to read it again.
'Photographs are moments of noticing. They are isolated acts, usually of awareness on the part of both photographer and photographed. It is a moment's contract. The space between photographer and photographed is sacred space. Others must not, will not walk across it...'
suggests George Szirtes...
'The time between old photographs shrinks. Soon there is nothing but photograph.'
Thinking now about Rings of Saturn, and its random photographs...W.G.Sebald would have liked that quote.
And it is the old photographs, and her analysis of them, that adds much to Hadley Freeman's book, which in turn made me wonder what people will use in fifty year's time...
Is anyone printing family photographs any more...
Goodness, who knew that a single book would not only keep me welded to the gravity recliner in the garden for three days, or give me so much to think about, but this one is a worthy permanent addition to the family memoir shelf and I most certainly commend it to the house.
I’m now reading Legacy by Thomas Harding, the story of the Lyons family empire, and would welcome any more suggestions of Jewish family memoirs, they really do make for excellent reading.
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