Alex and Sara had been happy to slough off their Polish identities as soon as they arrived in Paris. They were born in 1906 and 1910 respectively and so largely associated Chrzanow with the war and pogroms. But Jacques and Henri had lived there longer, and for that reason Jacques struggled more to shrug off his past entirely: he considered himself French but he remained rooted in the world of other immigrants, rarely mixing with native French people.
Henri, however, made a seamless chameleonic break. Strikingly tall – at least six foot two – and handsome, with a broad forehead and dark deep-set eyes, Henri set out to become a proper Frenchman. He learned the language quickly and while Alex proudly kept his Yiddish accent all his life, Henri soon sounded entirely French. His reasons were more personal than political: Poland to him represented his father’s death, and his years away studying had taken him further, geographically and mentally, from the shtetl world. For Henri, Poland was the past, France was the future, and that meant assimilating.
Jewish assimilation had a complicated history long before Jehuda Glahs became Jules Henri Glass. Chanukah, now one of the best-known Jewish holidays, is a celebration of Jews who refused to assimilate, as it’s a festival in memory of a small group of Jews who in 2 BC disobeyed their Greek-Syrian oppressors by not worshipping their gods. And yet the only reason Chanukah – always a minor holiday on the Jewish calendar – is so well-known now is because of its proximity to Christmas. As a result, Chanukah has turned into a quasi-Jewish Christmas and so, with an apt kind of Jewish irony, Chanukah itself has become assimilated.
And yet, especially after the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many Jews saw assimilation as a positive, progressive step; being part of the modern world instead of hiding from it behind shtetl walls, disguised within thick black clothes. Assimilation meant, as it did to Henri, having more options than one’s parents did. But others felt the cost of assimilation both too high and impossible. Jews would always be seen as the vilified outsiders.
Some of the most influential thinking about Jewish assimilation was inspired by events in Paris shortly before the Glass family moved there. After witnessing the Dreyfus scandal, Theodor Herzl, the Jewish journalist and political activist, rejected his earlier writings urging Jewish assimilation. Instead, he became the father of modern Zionism, telling Jews they would never be safe no matter how much they assimilated, so they should stay true to their identity and establish a Jewish homeland. Assimilated Jews loathed this theory, as they saw it as undermining all their efforts to become a part of their country’s civic life. And yet these efforts were, in the eyes of others, pointless: many non-Jews then believed that Jews could never be truly assimilated into a western country, and the question of how much they could be, or whether they could be at all, was known as the Jewish Question. So Herzl’s turnaround was, in the context of his time, pretty understandable.
Assimilated Jews could argue that Zionism was ultimately analogous to what German writers such as Theodor Fritsch, author of The Handbook of the Jewish Question, suggested when he argued that Jews should be kept separate, even banished, so as not to contaminate the Aryan race. This partly explains why some of the earliest and most enthusiastic supporters of Zionism were not Jews, but rather evangelical Christians and anti-Semites, and there was and is some but by no means a complete overlap between the two groups. Evangelicals believe that Jews returning to their homeland will hasten the return of the Messiah. Alongside this, Zionism still has enormous popularity among anti-Semites who are a lot less concerned with providing the Jews with a homeland than they are with simply segregating them.[9] Herzl saw where matters were heading for Jews in Europe long before others did.
France might have been known as une terre d’asile but the French most definitely did not see themselves as a nation of immigrants. Immigrants were expected to assimilate and those who kept themselves separate and retained their original identity were regarded as suspicious. Antipathy to what critics would call the self-ghettoisation of immigrants and what defenders would call immigrants’ distinctive identity was prevalent on both the left and the right in France,[10] and this attitude was hardly unique to France or the early twentieth century. In pretty much every western country today there is a belief that people who come to a new country should assimilate, almost as a show of gratitude, or at the very least politeness. Today this is mainly – but not solely – voiced by the right and is aimed largely at black and Muslim immigrants rather than Jewish ones.
But France had a particular passion for cultural assimilation, one that has only continued to sharpen, because of the country’s devotion to the principle of laïcité, or secularity. Originally intended as a neutral, even benign principle, laïcité was instituted in 1905 with the separation of Church and state, which meant that state funding was withdrawn from religions in order to place all faiths on an equal footing and protect schools in particular from the influence of the Catholic Church. But whereas in America today the separation of Church and state means the state cannot interfere in religion, in France it means all signs of religion are banned in the public sphere, which has led to endless torturous arguments about whether Muslim women can wear headscarves or burkinis. As many modern Muslim writers have pointed out, stopping a Muslim woman from covering herself does not mean she’ll go skipping down the Croisette in a bikini like a twenty-first-century Brigitte Bardot, but rather that she’ll cloister herself off even further from French society. And to a certain extent this is what Chaya did: aware that she was not part of or welcome in French bourgeois society as she was, she stayed firmly in the Pletzl. Henri, Alex and Sara, who had the active desire to assimilate, did otherwise.
Despite what right-wing politicians today suggest, assimilation is neither simple nor the answer. There exists, allegedly, a magical sweet spot where immigrants are assimilated enough so as not to offend natives with their jarringly exotic customs, but not so assimilated that they are stealing natives’ jobs and diluting the culture of the country. Immigrants are blamed by the media and politicians for not locating this spot themselves, but no one else has ever been able to define its whereabouts either, primarily because its location shifts depending on a country’s economic situation.
By the 1930s, growing numbers of French people came to see dangers in the idea of Jews assimilating, mixing among them unrecognised. After the relaxation of naturalisation laws in 1927, right-wing newspapers and politicians spoke doomfully about immigrants taking jobs as well as Jews corrupting French society with their Bolshevik ideas and infecting the people with their strange foreign germs. When it came to assimilation, Jews couldn’t win: mix into the culture and they were condemned; stay separate and they were damned. The Jewish Question was becoming a seemingly irresolvable puzzle and it would not be long before someone offered up the Final Solution.
Today, Jewish assimilation remains controversial, and while you still hear anti-Semites warning against it, some of the most striking critics are ultra-Orthodox Jews, who use the same arguments as those advanced by the rabbinical traditionalists of the nineteenth century. (And their fidelity to those arguments is, in their eyes, the point.) According to a study carried out by the Rabbinical Centre of Europe in 2014, as many as 85 per cent of Jews in Europe are assimilated, leading one member of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate Council to lament: ‘The assimilation in the shocking numbers that we see is worse than the Holocaust we saw.’[11]
You don’t need to be assimilated, or Jewish, to find this statement repulsive. But it is true that recognisably ob
servant Jewish people and communities are far less commonly seen in Europe today than they were at the beginning of the twentieth century. That’s not just because the Holocaust killed off so many of them[12] and many of the survivors went elsewhere (Israel, mainly), although both of those factors are certainly part of it – it’s because the successive generations have assimilated. Contrary to what Herzl and many others thought, Jewish assimilation has proven to be more than possible – it has become inevitable. As society has become increasingly secular, and Jews have made secure lives for themselves in western countries, often intermarrying with other faiths, the story of Jewish identity in the late twentieth century became a story of assimilation. Whether Jews are truly accepted depends on which Jew you ask, and how many times they’ve been accused on social media that day of being part of a Zionist conspiracy. But in terms of Jews living, working and socialising with non-Jews, this has become such a non-issue it’s almost hard to believe there was a time when it was otherwise, although that time is still very much in living memory: my grandparents would have been horrified if my father had married a non-Jewish woman, while my parents could not have cared less about the religion of my sister’s and my chosen partners. Jews have become more assimilated with each successive generation, and this is certainly borne out by my family. And for us, the path that led us here began with Henri.
All the Glass siblings were style-conscious, thanks to Reuben’s influence, but Henri approached fashion the most methodically, because it was part of his process of becoming French. He studied how his neighbours looked and he copied them, buying three-piece suits when he could find them second-hand; double-breasted wool coats with velvet collars; starchy white shirts and silk ties, and always a hat. Henri’s style was yet another thing Alex admired about his brother, and whenever he could find the material, he made pocket handkerchiefs for him, which Henri would carefully iron and then fold neatly to stick out of his breast pocket. In everything, from his studies to his appearance, he was utterly meticulous.
He was also a very private person, so when I started to research him I originally worried he might be the lacuna in the book, as he never talked about himself.
‘Did your father leave anything that might tell me about the past – an address book, perhaps, or even old calendars?’ I asked his daughter, Danièle, the first time I interviewed her for this book in her flat in Paris.
‘Oh yes, a couple of things. Come down to the basement, I’ll show you,’ she said mildly.
I followed her down the stairs, expecting, at most, some old birthday cards, perhaps a business card or two. She unlocked the door to her building’s storage unit and there were four suitcases, each containing every receipt Henri ever got, every business transaction he conducted, every letter he received and every photo he ever took, all perfectly filed in perfect French. Henri’s careful bookkeeping was a reflection of his naturally precise nature but also of his lifelong fear that the authorities would one day call him to account, because he wasn’t truly French. As a result I probably now know more about the minutiae of his business affairs than I do about my own.
For Henri, there was one big hurdle to his assimilation into French society: his failing businesses with Jacques. By 1931 the letters from lawyers were threatening the brothers with jail, each one another kick at his dreams. A man who has the bailiffs chasing him couldn’t be a respectable Frenchman, after all. At last, one spring day, the worst letter arrived, telling him to meet the lawyer’s assistant in Gare Saint-Lazare, in la Salle des Pas Perdus – the Room of Lost Steps, the poetic French name for the hallway or waiting area in railway stations or courthouses – and she would serve him with bankruptcy papers. He dressed wearily that morning, putting on his three-piece suit, fully expecting this to be the end of his brief Parisian life. Instead, it marked the true beginning of it.
Sophie Huttner, also known as Sonia, was born in 1905 in Kopyczynce, a small city 500 kilometres to the east of Chrzanow, in what is now the Ukraine. Born into a middle-class Jewish family and exceptionally bright from a young age, she moved to Paris in 1928 to study at the Sorbonne,[13] but she really came to experience life, and she certainly succeeded in that. At the time she arranged to serve this tall, quiet man with bankruptcy papers, she’d had at least two boyfriends, a Prussian prince and a man from Barcelona, and she later hinted there had been more; Sonia had always been popular with men, and it was not hard to see why. Although not beautiful the way Sara was – Sonia’s features were earthier and less delicate – she was sexy, smart, funny and flirtatious, and she knew how to tip her head down and then look up at a man through her lashes with an irresistible little smile. As soon as Henri saw her, waiting for him in the Room of Lost Steps, he fell hopelessly in love.
Henri and Sonia shortly after they met in Paris, 1930s.
Although both were Jewish and raised in Austria-Hungary, their backgrounds were utterly different. Henri’s father had been a travelling salesman, whereas Sonia’s father was a government official. Henri had to learn French when he arrived in Paris but Sonia had grown up speaking it, because her nanny had been a dispossessed French aristocrat. Sonia didn’t even really have to work, and she lived comfortably on her family’s money for her first few years in France. But she was too smart to sit around, and she had enough drive to power the whole of Paris. She was fluent in half a dozen languages: French, Polish, German, Spanish, English, Portuguese, and she could easily switch between them in conversation. So she worked as an interpreter at several companies and as a secretary at others, and it just so happened that she was working as a secretary in a lawyer’s office when she was sent to serve papers at Gare Saint-Lazare.
Henri was thirty-one when he met Sonia, but I could find no record of any other girlfriends in his past – no names mentioned among his letters, no teasing references by Sonia during their long lifetime together. It is entirely possible she was his first girlfriend, and he was certainly besotted by her. Henri was a keen photographer and while he took, at most, a few dozen photos of his family, he took hundreds of photos of Sonia during their courtship: here’s Sonia looking up coquettishly on a bridge; here’s Sonia in a beret, tight pencil skirt and sexy halter-neck top, plucking a leaf from a bush. Henri loved to photograph her, and Sonia loved to be photographed, posing with the ease of one who never lacked confidence about her looks. In one photo, taken in someone’s room, Sonia poses by a bed in a pair of high-waisted trousers and jacket. In the second picture, she has taken off the jacket to reveal a skimpy vest top, and she is now sitting on the bed. In the last, she has rolled the straps of her vest off her shoulder and she is lying on the bed and spreading her legs, looking into the camera with a sexuality so frank it is unnerving. I found these photos among Sonia’s possessions, twenty years after she died, and I let out a yelp when I got to the last one; you don’t expect to find eighty-year-old evidence of your great-uncle and great-aunt’s love life on an average Tuesday afternoon.
And apparently it was a very happy love life: Henri and Sonia got married on Christmas Day 1932, in Lwow, not far from where Sonia grew up, so her family could attend. Adolf Hitler would become chancellor of Germany just a few weeks later, but among the dozens of cards and letters the couple received from Sonia’s relatives and friends back home, many of whom would be killed in the Holocaust within a decade, there was only joy and hope for the future: ‘May you have a long and happy wedded life! Love, the Liebermans’; ‘Wishing joy and long life, the Zygfryd Reizs’; ‘God bless the newlyweds and their families on this happy day, the Koenigow Mlyniecs.’ And in one of Sonia’s scrapbooks I found a telegram from her new sister-in-law in France, dated 25/12/1932: ‘Bonheur bonheur bonheur de tout coeur – Sara.’
Henri didn’t have as much money as the Prussian prince, and maybe wasn’t as exciting as the man from Barcelona. But Sonia chose him because, as she explained to their daughter decades later, ‘I saw he was a good son and brother.’
Which was not to say that she was wild about his family.
Chaya she quickly got the measure of when Henri took her to his mother’s flat on rue des Rosiers and she saw how much Henri longed to get some kind of independence from her. So she fashioned herself between them, stepping in whenever Chaya asked Henri to accompany her to synagogue or to do her shopping at the local kosher markets. Jacques, Sonia thought, was sweet, the sweetest of them all, only lacking in backbone. Sara bemused her with her love of fashion. But Sara told her how happy she was to have a real sister – she’d had Mindel, but Mindel had died so long ago, and she had Rose Ornstein, but Rose was really her cousin. Sonia was her sister! She’d desperately wanted a sister, and Sonia, touched, told her she felt the same.
Sonia and Sara.
Alex was a different story: Sonia and Alex loathed one another from the moment they met. Alex couldn’t believe that his idolised older brother – so tall and so handsome! – who, to his mind, could have had his pick of any Frenchwoman in Paris would choose this short, dumpy Polack. Henri had been a father figure to Alex for pretty much all of his life, ever since Reuben went off to war, and he reacted to Sonia’s arrival like a petulant child to a new stepmother. He thought she was ugly, fat and unworthy of his brother. And Sonia, who sized up Alex about as quickly as she did Chaya, saw in Alex an arrogant bully. Neither of them ever found cause to alter their first impression.
But family aside, Henri and Sonia were blissfully content newlyweds. Sonia had a much easier relationship with her past than Henri, because her childhood had been much happier. There were no tortured issues about identity, assimilation or non-assimilation for Sonia: she had grown up multilingual, so flitting between nationalities felt utterly natural to her, and her language skills were so good she was often mistaken for a native of multiple countries. And yet, even though Sonia spoke Polish and Yiddish, they almost always spoke to one another in French.