House of Glass

‘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.

The Glahs family kept kosher and Reuben, like all the Jewish men in Chrzanow, went to prayers every Shabbat and on holy days, walking to the Great Synagogue off the market square around the corner from their home. They were Orthodox but not ultra-Orthodox, unlike many of their fellow townspeople who dominated the local politics, in their heavy black clothes, long beards and side curls. In the very few surviving photos of the Glahs children from this period, which I found in Sala’s and Henri’s albums, the boys often wear yarmulkes, but they don’t have side curls or wear traditional clothes, and Sala is generally wearing pretty frilly dresses, while Chaya never covered her hair, as ultra-Orthodox women do. Their lives were informed by Judaism, but not controlled by it, and compared with many of their neighbours they were almost scandalously modern.

Throughout Galicia at this time there was a growing schism among the Jews regarding tradition versus progress, with the heavy-coated conservatives on one side, and the less tradition-bound Jews on the other. The latter argued for a modern approach to Judaism, influenced by the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, which emerged in the late eighteenth century and argued that Jews should maintain their secular distinctiveness, but should also take more part in the modern world, such as adopting modern dress and broader education. It looked at Judaism as an evolving cultural identity rather than a restrictive religious one. Ironically, this ideology that pushed for integration would later contribute to the rise of Zionism, partly because many Jews later realised that, no matter how much they assimilated, they were still persecuted, and therefore Jews needed a Jewish homeland.

But in Austria-Hungary in the early twentieth century, the idea of a Jewish state was so far away it might have been on the moon. Given that traditional Jews far outnumbered progressive ones in Galicia in general and Chrzanow in particular, the whole debate was ostensibly moot for Chrzanovian Jews. But Jehuda, a talented scholar from an early age who would likely have read about the Haskalah, argued for his family to adopt a more progressive approach to Judaism. In his memoir, Sender describes, with palpable retrospective awe of his big brother, how at the young age of twelve Jehuda urged his parents to be less obviously Jewish and to assimilate more with the Germans or Poles – to try to speak their language more instead of always relying on Yiddish, for example. Chaya waved her son away and continued to speak Yiddish loudly in the town square. Reuben similarly couldn’t countenance giving up what he saw as his primary identity. But as a compromise, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Jehuda to change the spelling of their surname from Glahs to the more westernised Glass – something simultaneously strong and fragile, able to withstand pressure but prone to breaking. Jews’ names as a whole in this period were unfixed, mutable – a sign it seemed to them at the time of their adaptability. But it was also an indication of the instability of their lives, and was seen as part of their ‘rootlessness’ that would soon be used against them.

All four children idolised their gentle, loving father, who raised his hand only once: to Sender (of course), when he announced at age four, on the way to synagogue, that he didn’t believe in God, and the strike was so half-hearted it felt more like a pat. Although Chaya was undoubtedly the more assertive parent, it was Reuben’s looks that were dominant. Jehuda, Jakob and Sala all inherited Reuben’s delicate, pretty appearance; Jakob in particular, who Reuben named after his beloved late father,[8] looked so similar to him the neighbours used to joke they probably had the same fingerprints. He was also the most like his father: gentle, passive and easily pushed around – Jakob skipped school only because Sender told him to do so. Jehuda, quiet and self-contained, inherited his father’s intellectual curiosity, but he was more reliable and practical. As for baby Sala, her father loved to buy pretty dresses for his little daughter, while Chaya, judging from photos, would not have recognised a pretty dress from an ugly one if it hit her in the face in the market place. But Reuben always took care over his appearance, even when he was reduced to wearing almost literal rags. The Glahs children all inherited his appreciation of aesthetics, and for the rest of their lives they dressed carefully and stylishly, a lifelong show of love for their father.

The only child who resembled, and acted, like Chaya was Sender. According to family lore Sender was ‘born fighting’, because when he came out of his mother he was silent, so the midwife slapped him. It was the last time in his life Sender lost a fight. From the age of six he was getting into scraps at school, daily. He wasn’t bothered by the blood and bruises as long as he won the battle, and he always fought until he won. Sender was born on 25 December and his mother referred to him as ‘little Jesus’, a teasing reference to his dominating personality, which was in inverse proportion to his physical size. Unlike his brothers, Sender was short, something he later put down to ‘deprivation’, although he never explained why his brothers both grew to over 6 feet, about a foot taller than him. But Sender wasn’t just a stubby little fighter – he was also a dreamer, and what he dreamed of was escape. He loved to hear his father describe places he’d read about, such as Paris, London, Venice, cities of such beauty they made the Chrzanow synagogues look like nothing, Reuben said. Sender loved his father, but he would never be like him, slaving away for no recognition. What was the point of working hard without reward? At the age of eight, Paris was far beyond his reach, so he came up with a plan to go to the closer and yet almost equally exotic Trzebina, a town 7 kilometres away, where people from Chrzanow went when they needed a dentist. Sender told his mother he had a terrible toothache and Chaya let him take the train on his own with his favourite cousin, Josek Ornstein. The town itself was something of a disappointment, but the freedom of travel thrilled Sender so much he was, for once, almost speechless. Even though it meant the boys had to suffer a hideously painful tooth extraction by the dentist, the journey was worth it. So much so, they did it again, costing them another tooth. Still worth it.

‘It was a world of superstitions, of quarrelling rabbis, quarrelling Hasidim, where thousands of Jews lived, twenty synagogues, where the air was so fresh. I sometimes felt, in lieu of food, I was nourished by the Carpathian air,’ Alex later wrote. But then the First World War started and everything that had been good about the children’s lives instantly turned very, very bad.

WHEN CHAYA WAVED her husband off to war she must have had few hopes of ever seeing him again. Reuben couldn’t even walk up Aleja Henryka without losing his breath, and that one time he gave Sender a smack he, rather than Sender, had cried – how on earth was such a man going to survive life in the Austro-Hungarian Army? But like many Jewish men, Reuben felt intense loyalty to the Emperor Franz Joseph I because of his kindness to the Jews. An educated man like Reuben would have been all too aware that it was very much in his best interest, as a Jew, to defend the emperor. So he signed up to fight pretty much as soon as his country declared war on Serbia. But there were, surely, few more unlikely soldiers than Reuben Glass.

Chaya was now, essentially, a single mother at the age of forty-one, with four children, aged thirteen, twelve, eight and four. There was no way she could look after them on her own. Her older sister, Hadassah, was busy enough with her own seven children and her brother, Samuel, was busy with his four. No, she needed a man to take charge of the household, one who would look after the family and look after her. She didn’t have to search too far to find just the one she needed.

Jehuda was only thirteen, but when his father went off to war he became the head of the household. Chaya relied on him, not even like a wife on a husband but a daughter on a father, and this was to be their dynamic for the rest of their lives. It was an obligation Jehuda quietly shouldered with enormous patience. ‘Jehuda,’ Chaya would say proudly to her children and, later, her grandchildren, ‘iz die beste.’ (Sender, on the other hand, she would describe as alternately a ‘Pshakrev’ – dog’s blood, or a Polish curse – or ‘mitzvah’, a blessing, depending on both of their moods.) Despite still being at school, Jehuda, as he later recounted in his own notes, s

upported the family, working for the library in the evenings and at weekends, and he tried, with minimal success, to get his brothers to go to school. He, too, started missing school: his 1916/17 school report says he missed 145 hours that year, but he still got straight As. However, as Chaya became more demanding, and life in Chrzanow became more difficult, what he really wanted was to leave. Whereas Sender looked to schemes and tooth extractions as his means of escape, Jehuda realised academia might be his ticket.

Food became increasingly scarce in Chrzanow as the war went on and the Jews were used as the scapegoats for everyone’s suffering; Polish authorities started confiscating their goods, claiming, falsely, that they were trading on the black market. The local halls in town, where the Jews had often held cultural committee meetings, were suddenly off-limits to them.[9] Both Sender and Jehuda watched all this, and began talking more openly about leaving the town. Jakob laughed at their concerns, and insisted the Jews would be safe in Chrzanow, as they always had been. Little Sala, who had Jehuda’s quietude and Jakob’s gentleness, revered her three older brothers, and agreed with whichever one seemed to be taking charge, which was generally Jehuda. But any talk of leaving Chrzanow could only be talk for now: they weren’t going anywhere until the war ended and their father returned.

However it was becoming almost impossible for them to stay. In late October 1918 there were rumours that a pogrom was being planned, organised by the Polish authorities. On 5 November 1918, six days before the end of the war, the first town in the newly liberated Poland to suffer such an attack was Chrzanow.[10]

They came at night. The townspeople heard them before they saw them, ‘a savage screaming crowd that seemed like a monster. They were attacking animals, wild beasts from the guts of hell. From their distorted snouts came cries of a horrible hatred which I found impossible to understand,’ Sender wrote. Polish men and women tore through the town, ransacking the synagogues, smashing the Jewish shop windows. The Jews ran to their homes, frantically locking the doors behind them. The Glass family hid under a bed, both Sala, who was eight, and Chaya, forty-five, clinging to seventeen-year-old Jehuda in terror. After an hour or so of listening to the frightening noises outside, twelve-year-old Sender scrambled out from under the bed and, ignoring the cries of his family, ran out to join the few Jewish men who were attempting to fight back. In the dark, he tried to make out the faces, but they were so obscured by hate and fury they looked more like wild boars than humans to him – except one. As he watched the group charge up his street he looked at the leader and realised he recognised him: it was Jehuda’s former tutor, the Christian Pole who came over for dinner occasionally. As he looked closer, he recognised some more: people who came in every Sunday to go to church, the man who sometimes gave him a bit of cheese in the market, women who had bought sewing machines from his father. He saw a well-respected judge, Court President Wierszbyicki, he saw scholars, and he saw peasants and thugs – representatives of all sectors of Polish society and here they were, beating up his friends, trying to burn down his house and kill his family.

‘Something in me died in the face of this inhuman explosion of savagery,’ he later wrote. ‘From that day, my childhood was over.’

The pogrom lasted twenty-four hours, and Sender did as much as a young boy could to fight back, tripping the men as they charged in to ransack the empty stores, kicking their horses. At one point he was slashed across the forehead with a knife and, decades later, Sala could still remember her terror when her brother stumbled through their door in the morning, blinded by blood pouring into his eyes from his deep head wound, half-crazed with adrenalin; for the rest of her life she associated Poland with that vision of violence. In one night, almost all the town’s Jews were left destitute, their money and livelihoods taken from them by their own countrymen. When the war ended six days later, few celebrated.

From then on, attacks on Jews became common in Chrzanow and in the surrounding area, especially from the so-called ‘Polish liberation army’, which emerged after Poland’s liberation at the end of the war. Its members were known as ‘the Hallerchiks’ in honour of their leader General Haller, and they would roam through Chrzanow ripping the beards off any Jews they encountered, tearing the skin and laughing at the bloodied faces. If they came across a clean-shaven Jew, they would beat him for his lack of religiosity. They justified these attacks by citing the increasingly popular theory that Jews were not loyal to Poland, but were instead Bolsheviks, plotting to overturn the government. Neither the Hallerchiks nor the Chrzanovians could have known it at the time, and certainly the Glass family didn’t, but they were at the emerging forefront of a relatively new kind of anti-Semitism, one that would shape the twentieth century, and their own lives. And it would linger, like a strange stray black cloud, over the lives of their children and grandchildren.

The theory that Jews are political destabilisers, working against whatever country they live in, is a more modern and politically inflected form of anti-Semitism than the traditional and religiously based one, which held Jews responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion. It emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a reaction against the social and economic changes in Europe, stemming from the French Revolution, when the old monarchical hierarchies were toppled, followed by the spread of industrialisation and urbanisation across the Continent. These two enormous shifts combined to create a new liberal, capitalist social order, one in which citizenship was based on civic participation and equality, as opposed to bloodline and history – forward-looking rationalism over backward-looking nationalism.[11] Thus, Jews could be seen as citizens as opposed to outsiders. Opponents of the Enlightenment, however, argued for national purity, celebrating a country’s heritage as opposed to its modern future, and during the nineteenth century there was a rise in anti-Semitism, as those who failed to benefit from the new economy blamed the Jews. In 1845 the French writer Alphonse Toussenel claimed in Les Juifs, Rois de l’Époque: ‘Protestants and Jews … have controlled public opinion in order to favour trafficking and rigging the market, blocked every defence of royalty and of the people, put the producer and the consumer at their mercy so that in France the Jew reigns and governs.’

These beliefs were validated by the infamous 1903 document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which emerged just as the Glass children were being born. It claimed that a mysterious Jewish cabal was controlling governments and the media, and even though the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was quickly exposed as a hoax, it helped to forge the dominating anti-Semitic narrative of the twentieth century. This really began to take hold after the First World War, when nationalism escalated in response to the economic devastation across the Continent, although specific takes on it differed slightly. In one version of this theory, Jews are greedy money-hoarders who control a country’s government through their connections and wealth, puppet masters pulling the strings. In the other version, the one promoted by the Hallerchiks, Jews are communist revolutionaries looking to overthrow a country’s government. But the message of both versions is the same: Jews are political disruptors working against the people and for themselves, which is just a new take on the old idea that Jews are not really citizens of the country in which they were born, so cannot be trusted. In other words, anti-Semitism becomes another form of xenophobia.

This theory has retained a tenacious hold on the popular imagination, despite everything Jews endured in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century it can be seen in, for example, the right wing’s demonisation of George Soros, the Hungarian-American philanthropist and Holocaust survivor who has been vilified by the American,[12] Hungarian[13] and British far right[14] as a suspicious manipulator plotting to control the global order and bring chaos into the lives of peaceful citizens.[fn1]

[fn2] The campaign for Brexit – which went on near simultaneously with the vilification of Soros, and crossed left and right party lines – would probably have appealed to the Hallerchiks, with its dreamy-eyed talk about hard bor

ders, heritage and national purity. Nigel Farage, Brexit’s most influential architect, has long talked darkly about ‘the new world order’ and argued that ‘globalists have wanted to have some form of conflict with Russia as an argument for us all to surrender our national sovereignty and give it up to a higher global level.’[15] It takes some effort not to hear the echoes of the Hallerchiks’ insistence that Jews, those citizens of nowhere, were working against Poland for some kind of greater global domination, but Farage determinedly stuck his fingers in his ears and insisted any suggestion of anti-Semitism was ‘wide of the mark’.[fn3] From ‘Bolsheviks’ in the 1920s to ‘globalists’ in the 2010s, the euphemisms for anti-Semitic and nationalist beliefs might shift over time, but the underlying stories remain remarkably constant.

CONTRARY TO EVERYONE’S EXPECTATIONS, his wife’s presumably most of all, Reuben did return from the war, but only barely. He had fought in the Second Battle of the Piave River in June 1918, in which the Italian Army crushed the Austro-Hungarian Army. This battle was the beginning of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which almost 230,000 men were killed, but Reuben survived. He was, however, badly gassed, and his lungs damaged irrevocably. Somehow, he limped through the rest of the war, further depleting whatever strength his lungs had left, and returned home, where he walked in the door and collapsed in the front room.

When Reuben realised how poor his family had become in his absence, with Sender stealing food for the family table and Sala wearing rags, he forced himself to return to work. Reuben didn’t have a pension from the army, and the family desperately needed money, so he went back to hawking Singer sewing machines around the countryside. But there are few worse careers for a man with broken lungs than that of travelling salesman, schlepping through sooty towns on dirty trains in cold nights.

‘My father was very, very ill, and there was no medicine for him. As if we could afford medicine. He had to return to work, to continue his endless travels as a sewing machine salesman for a miserable little salary. Great sadness infected our home,’ Sender wrote.