House of Glass

‘This IS my place!’ he snapped back. But Alex had had enough of living with his family, so he simply walked out of the Marais, bought a newspaper, looked in the property section and went to the first available apartment that he could afford, around the corner from the Gare de l’Est. He gave the landlord forged identity papers, so he wouldn’t know how young he was, and because Alex didn’t have enough money for a bank account, he got his more well-known employers and customers to provide references, hoping their names would dazzle the landlord. He was right. Alex was still only a teenager, and he looked at least four years younger because he was so small, but he already knew how to game the system.

Chaya moved out soon, too, to a little flat on rue des Rosiers, the central spine of the Pletzl, and Sara lived with her in between stays in the sanatoriums. Back then, rue des Rosiers was filthy and almost intolerably noisy (a terrible place, in other words, for someone to stay while recovering from pleurisy). Today it is a very chic street, partially pedestrianised so visitors can shop that little bit more easily at boutiques such as Lululemon and Annick Goutal. Few signs of the street’s earlier Jewish life still exist – there is a Jewish bakery at one end, although, alone on this street of high-end shops, it feels more like a heritage tourist site than something connected to the life of the area – fancy dress among the fancy dresses. A more revealing remnant of the past can be found next door at 16 rue des Rosiers: a plaque commemorating the memory of five former inhabitants, including a twelve-year-old (Rosette Lewkowicz), a two-year-old (Viktor Wajncwaig) and a one-month-old (Paulette Wajncwaig) who were killed in the Holocaust ‘par les Nazis, parce que nés juifs. Avec la complicité active du gouvernement de Vichy’ (by the Nazis, because they were born Jewish. With the active complicity of the Vichy government).

Sara and Chaya in their apartment on rue des Rosiers.

The Glass brothers could now focus on building their lives in Paris. For Alex, this meant becoming a couturier. He lived on his own but managed to save up enough money so that after finishing his apprenticeships, instead of working for a designer as most other aspiring young couturiers did, he decided to achieve his dream: at the age of only twenty, he opened his first couture salon. He called it Alex Maguy instead of Alex Glass, and he gave varying reasons for this over the years. In his memoir he says Maguy ‘sounded more Parisian’; he once told my father, Ronald, it was to make him sound like a typical Frenchman. He also claimed it was in honour of a friend’s wife, who was called Marguerite. And maybe those reasons are true. But perhaps Alex was also making a further break between his new life as a Parisian couturier and his old life as a Polish peasant, and by taking an entirely new surname he was putting a definitive division between his new, independent life and the emotionally enmeshed one he had with his family. Henri was not the only sibling to understand that changing one’s name was an effective way to break from the past.

Alex’s salon was small and basic, a two-room former office space, a far cry from the plush silk-strewn luxury he and Sara had seen through the windows of Lanvin and Patou. But the details were irrelevant because he had done it: he had his own couture company, at 29 rue d’Argenteuil, near the Palais-Royal and just around the corner from the great couturiers. He had never even been allowed in any of their showrooms, having been relegated to the back rooms with the other trainees and workers, but now he had one of his own. It was, by any measure, an incredible achievement, especially for a designer who was hardly more than a teenager. Few rushed faster to achieve their dreams than Alex: ‘I had never been in a salon de couture and had no idea what they were like, but that was of no importance. I wanted to be Number One. The best,’ he writes. In the encyclopaedic catalogue, Paris Couture Années Trente, the entry about Alex (who appears just before Mainbocher) begins: ‘This house of couture was run by an extremely young man.’ But the catalogue underestimates Alex in saying that his first show was in 1937. In fact, it was eleven years earlier as Alex sent out invites as soon as he moved into his salon, summoning potential clients and the press to see the first collection of ‘the Napoleon of couture’. Of all the things Alex lacked at various points in his life – food, stability, support – self-belief was never one of them.

The only person who was more proud of Alex than Alex himself was his sister. Almost eighty years after Alex opened his house, I found among my grandmother’s belongings several photocopies of the pages about Alex in the 1956 book, The Dressmakers of France, by Mary Brooks Picken and Dora Loues Miller. Alex had clearly sent the photocopies to my grandmother, even signing them proudly and grandly on the back, and she kept them for the rest of her life. It’s easy to see why the entry about Alex appealed to them both, because it gives a real, and merited, sense of just how extraordinary Alex’s achievement was:

He started his house in 1926. And it was his house – he had no partners, no financial backers. He was his house. And that was rare, for the combination of designer and businessman is a difficult role to maintain successfully over a period of years. His passion had always been painting – and in his studio the walls were covered with truly unusual paintings. An intimate of the great Kisling, he was also a friend of most of the living artists of his day who were considered significant. Perhaps that association explains his continued inspiration for creation. Where he obtained or inherited his business ability is unexplained. Perhaps that came from his sympathy and understanding of many types of people – businessmen as well as artists.

Alex had grown up in a world as disconnected from couture as it was from space exploration, and given how bad his father – and brothers – were at business, Picken and Miller’s comment about his business ability being ‘unexplained’ is quite an understatement. But Alex taught himself to be good at business, because he knew he needed to be so

to succeed. Beauty was an ideal but Alex had learned from his father’s struggles that one cannot eat ideals. Fashion, it seemed to him, was a way of living in a world of beauty but also making money from it – an aesthetic practice but also a commercial one.

As well as being inspired by the paintings in his studio, which were mostly by his new friends, he got inspiration from the city where he lived, taking in all the Parisian elegance he saw around him, digesting it, and recreating it through clothes. He took the long dresses worn by the high-society women he saw in Renoir’s paintings and subtly modernised them, getting rid of the corsets, raising the hems and cropping the sleeves. For his first show he riffed on the outfits worn by the jockeys at Longchamp, that most Parisian scene of high society; everything, for him, was about paying homage to the beauty of Paris and trying to add to it. The critics loved it: the journalist from L’Officiel, the upmarket French fashion magazine that is still popular today, described him as ‘so talented’ but worried that he would become disheartened with how hard the business was.

They were right to worry: not a single one of his outfits from his first collection sold. Although Alex had chosen the more ostensibly glamorous profession when he opted to be a couturier near Place Vendôme over working as a tailor in the Pletzl, he had actually picked the much more difficult job. As a tailor, he would likely have been working for a contractor, who would have been in charge of selling the clothes to department stores or smaller shops around Paris.[14] This was how Jacques worked, and it saved him from having to deal with retail issues, which he could never have done. As a couturier, and a young and unestablished one, Alex had to deal with everything: the designs, the sewing, the marketing, the customers and the production. As one historian later put it: ‘Running a fashion salon [in Paris in the 1930s] took the skill of a military general; securing the assurance of a faithful following demanded the diplomacy of a minister of state.’[15]

But Alex had one thing in his favour: he never, ever admitted defeat. After he failed to sell any outfits from his first collection, he shed ‘one tear of frustration’ and then promptly gathered up his designs and sold them to the more established houses around the corner. Each of the houses asked if they were exclusive – in other words, no other house would have these patterns – and Alex unhesitatingly said yes, even while he had the money for selling the same designs to different couturiers in his back pocket. According to Alex’s memoir, the ruse was quickly discovered by Nina Ricci, then working at the design house Raffin, and she summoned the young designer to explain himself. Anyone else would have run away in fear, or at least crawled in to the meeting cringing with contrition, but Alex was defiant.

‘Alex, it was not nice of you to sell this design to other houses,’ the fearsome, white-haired designer said to him.

‘Please forgive me, but I am just starting out, what did you expect?’ he snapped back.

Fortunately, Madame Ricci already liked Alex, having met him when he did an apprenticeship at Raffin, and she asked him why he wanted to be a designer, when it was such a hard career.

‘Because I burn with new ideas – young ideas, which you don’t see in couture,’ he replied. ‘I want to give a woman the most natural beauty possible, rid her of the straitjacket of corsets, to make her supple. I want to invent a new elegance in harmony with the modern world, dressing a woman as lightly as possible. I dream of Paris, and the legendary elegance of its women. I would be proud to make a contribution to couture!’

When he finally paused for breath Madame Ricci offered him a job at Raffin, but Alex refused. He was betting, against every possible odd, that he could make it on his own.

Henri and Jacques thought they were playing it safer than their younger brother by staying in the Pletzl, slogging it out in the garment trade. In the early 1930s, they were also running a wood-carving shop, although ‘running’ was something of an overstatement. By the spring of 1931 both their businesses were bankrupt and people were chasing them for debts. But while Jacques merely shrugged at this development, seeing it as yet another hurdle in a life from which he expected nothing but hurdles, Henri was completely mortified. He’d loved his father but he had not studied so hard to live on the edge of bankruptcy as Reuben had done, and, unlike Jacques, he could not bear the humiliation of being dragged through the legal system. His ambitions might not have been as high as Alex’s, but he had a greater sense of pride than Jacques, and he hoped for more from life than his brother. Otherwise, what had been the point in coming to Paris at all? There was, he was sure, a better life out there for him.

Sara Glass.

By the early 1930s, all the Glasses were living in Paris. Sara had come home from the sanatoriums for good, healthy at last, living with her mother on rue des Rosiers and starting to think about what she wanted from life. Henri was also figuring out what he wanted to do and, like Sara, was in a city so beautiful he hardly believed he could call it home. Alex was working as a couturier, just as he’d dreamed he would, and Jacques was – occasional court appearance aside – working steadily as a furrier in the Pletzl, just down the road from his mother, which was as much as he’d ever asked of life. They were all, in their different ways, content, planning for what they imagined would be an uninterrupted future in France, working, living and maybe one day loving as they wished, and always within comfortable walking distance from one another. They had escaped what they thought were the worst of times and created lives for themselves in the most beautiful city in the world. Their story of immigration was, at this moment in time, successful. But in just a handful of years, everything that they had worked so hard to achieve would be taken away from them again by the same beast they had tried so desperately to escape.

Young Henri.

3

HENRI – Assimilation

Paris, 1930s

JUST AS LIFE was becoming good for the Glass family personally, it was getting extremely bad for Jews in Europe generally. By the early 1930s, the Great Depression crisis bit into France, travelling eastwards from the United States, while at the same time eastern European Jewish refugees were running westwards towards France for safety. This confluence of international disasters resulted in a resurgence of the French anti-Semitism that had been dammed back after the First World War, and the immigrants who were once so welcomed for filling the gaps in the workplace were now attacked for stealing French jobs. The Metz Chamber of Commerce declared: ‘These foreign competitors, highly undesirable, have become a veritable plague for honest French merchants.’ In 1931 the president of the French Medical Association complained about ‘this legion of Jews’ coming into the medical profession.[1]

Politicians and commentators pushed three lines of attack against the immigrant Jews in France: that they were taking jobs from the French, that they were Bolshevik revolutionaries determined to destroy France, and that they were diseased criminals. François Coty, the perfume magnate who owned two newspapers, L’Ami du Peuple and Le Figaro, was so horrified by the growing numbers of German Jewish refugees arriving in the city after Hitler’s election that he suggested they were a German plot to destroy France from within, and his papers relentlessly pushed this theory.[2] In 1934 Gaetan Sanvoisin wrote in Le Figaro: ‘Hitler has sent us some 50,000 German Jews who are, for the most part, extremely dangerous revolutionaries.’

Any immigrant Jew who arrived in Paris expecting to find some kind of kinship with the French Jews was disappointed. The two groups were miles apart from one another, mentally and physically. Unlike the immigrants, who were largely workers, the native Jews were more bourgeois and they certainly didn’t live in the Pletzl. They lived in the posher parts of the city and worked in liberal professions, such as banking, medicine and law.[3] They spoke French, not Yiddish, many did not bother celebrating the Sabbath, and they looked at these immigrants as potential threats to their hard-fought efforts to be part of the French bourgeoisie.[4] In other words, they were assimilated, and to the eastern European immigrant arrivals the French Jew

s seemed to be even more foreign than the French Catholics; differences with those you expect to be on your side are always more shocking than those you know to be your opposite. To the French Jews, the immigrants were embarrassingly backward, and their reluctance to relinquish their old traditions was baffling. Hadn’t they learned from the past that they needed to blend in? They knew these new arrivals would only exacerbate the anti-Jewish feelings in the city, and make life worse for them.[5] To differentiate themselves from these coarse newcomers, who were rapidly making up more than half of the city’s Jewish population and thus becoming a highly visible representation of Judaism to the French, many native Jews pointedly defined themselves in opposition to them. They described themselves as French first, and they complained that the new arrivals were too dirty, too noisy, too loud with their Yiddish – too obviously Jewish, in short.[6]

How much of one’s ancestral identity must one give up to live in the modern world? How much do the actions of one part of a group reflect on the whole? And is a refusal to blend in a show of strength or self-defeating rigidity? And must the choice always be between assimilation and self-ghettoisation? Could there not be an option of inclusion, which allows for acceptance of a minority group’s differences without this being seen as a threat to the majority? Natives and immigrants, Jewish and otherwise, have argued these questions for centuries, with each other and with themselves, and they will do so for centuries more. In the case of the native and immigrant Parisian Jews, the debate was irresolvable, not least because the two groups largely stayed away from one another. The French Jews didn’t want to be associated with the immigrants, and the immigrants reacted to that rejection in what would soon turn out to be the worst way possible: they remained separate from French life.[7] During the 1920s and 1930s immigrant Jews formed their own little communities in Paris, creating pockets of mini-Polands, -Russias and -Lithuanias, in the Pletzl and around Bastille and Belleville. Although this gave them a sense of community in their new country, its advantages were to prove brutally short term. Because the ghettos kept them separate from the rest of the city, the immigrants remained unknown, strange, not French and thus, later, easy to sacrifice.[8] But in a similar vein to what the Chrzanow Jews thought of the Poles and later the Germans, so the immigrant Jews in Paris believed of France: surely their neighbours would protect them. And again, like the Chrzanow Jews, they were to be proven wrong.

Chaya especially and Jacques largely typified the behaviour of immigrant Jews: they remained unassimilated and stayed among Polish Jewish immigrants. Henri, Alex and Sara, by contrast, were more on the side of the French Jews. To them, Poland was a backward pit of hate and ignorance. Next to cultured, beautiful Paris, where people weren’t beating them up in the street, there was no question in their minds with which country they wanted to identify.