House of Glass

‘Dinner is ready,’ said Chaya, bringing out the food and taking her seat.

Mr Kellerman ate hungrily, apparently unaware of or unbothered by his wife’s increasingly obvious flirtations with Bill. Sara, as usual, picked at her food, and when Bill asked if she worked Alex answered for her.

‘She’s an artist, I told you – really nice paintings, and such a beauty herself all the famous artists want to paint her,’ he said, to Sara’s confusion. Not only was that not true but Alex never spoke that way about her.

Sara mostly kept her head down but every time she looked up she noticed Bill was staring at her and it unnerved her, so she quickly looked down again. Then, just as Alex was about to launch into another story about his great fashion successes, Bill interrupted him.

‘You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen and I am completely in love with you,’ he said, looking straight at Sara.

The room went silent.

‘Come to America with me next month. I’ll get you a return ticket so you can go back if you want. But come with me. I’m an honest, hard-working man and I’ll take care of you,’ he continued, reaching his arm across the table.

Sara did not reach back to take his hand. Instead, she m

ade a forced laugh. ‘Is this the famous American sense of humour?’ she asked.

But he shook his head, shaking off her hint. ‘I am not joking. I fell in love with you the minute I saw you. Come with me. I will look after you. I promise,’ he said.

Sara looked to Alex for help, but for once he said nothing. Her mother also sat there silently. Mrs Kellerman couldn’t understand what was happening but she had a good idea, and she looked like she was about to burst with fury. Only Mr Kellerman kept eating, utterly unfazed by the scene in front of him. Sara realised no one was going to help her here, so she told Bill that he was clearly drunk and if he didn’t stop it she would have to ask him to leave.

Dinner continued, awkwardly, with Bill pointedly staring at her and Sara pointedly staring down at her plate. At least, she thought, after this dinner she wouldn’t have to see him again. It would be over.

It was not over. Alex brought the American over twice more that week for dinner – without the Kellermans, at least – and both times the scene replayed itself, with him telling Sara that he loved her. If she thought she would be free of him once he finally sailed back to America on 2 March, she had once again underestimated him. As soon as he was back home a week later the phone calls began. Every few days he called her on her building’s shared phone, begging her to come and join him, telling her he loved her, promising to treat her well. Just one transatlantic phone call in those days would have been a big deal; a dozen was akin to him sending her diamonds.

Initially she scoffed at his proposals, but Alex started to push her to accept them (it had been Alex, of course, who gave Bill Sara’s building’s phone number). He told her the Nazis were coming and were going to kill them all. This invitation to America was a gift from God and if she turned it down she was as stupid as Mila. If she went to America she would be able to get the rest of them out of Europe – and if she didn’t, she was condemning them to death.

‘You’re going to kill us, is that what you want? You marrying this guy is our last chance,’ Alex would tell her, while she cried in a chair.

Other times, he would try a different tactic, one covered more in sugar than vinegar: ‘He’s a millionaire on Park Avenue, he works in the fashion business – what more could you want? He’s a handsome guy, and so tall! Taller even than Henri! I’ve known him for years, he’s a great guy,’ he would say, smiling at her, stroking her pale hand. One man was pulling her to America and the other pushing her, and between them she started to break.

Eventually she went to Henri for help. What should she do? She didn’t want to leave her home, her fiancé, her family. But if she didn’t, would they all be killed by the Germans? Henri sighed. While he didn’t follow the news quite as closely as Alex, he certainly knew about what was happening in Europe, mainly because of Sonia. She read newspapers every day, in multiple languages, and she had been warning Henri about Hitler for years. Henri also had kept some friends from his time in Danzig, and so he knew very well how that city had been taken over by the Nazis in 1933, and how the Jews had had to flee. Meanwhile Sonia heard frequently from her family scattered around Poland about the rise of fascist groups there. So when Henri had mentioned Alex’s plan to Sonia the week before, after having heard about it from his mother, Sonia said, unhesitatingly, ‘She should go.’ They’d all lived through pogroms and terror before. The prospect of any of these things returning was not an abstract concept to them.

‘You should go,’ Henri told Sara.

‘And that’s when your grandmother knew she was going,’ Sonia later told me.

Sara went to Rose and Herman Brenner’s apartment and cried, and they told her she should listen to Henri; maybe Rose and Herman would come and live in America, too, one day. Who knew what might happen with the world’s politics going the way they were? In what must have been a state close to shock, Sara began to accept that she was going to America to marry a man she didn’t know and liked less. She would never have done it just to save herself. But for her whole family? Of course she went.

Alex and Jacques had tried to save their family by going to war. Henri would do his part through his work. The only option open to Sara was the one that countless women had been forced to take before her: marry someone she did not love. It is the traditional form of female sacrifice, so common that it was considered at the time expected and unremarkable. What would have been extraordinary, in the eyes of those around her then, was if she’d refused to do it.

But how did she explain any of this to her fiancé? Did she say goodbye at all, or just disappear for good? How do you tell the love of your life, with whom you’re planning a life, that you’re leaving him to marry someone you’ve barely met? Her photo album, of her life in France in the 1930s, is a wordless yet eloquent testimony of not what she said, but how she felt about leaving behind her love and her life. At some point, she diligently went through it and either tore out whole photos and ripped them up or, with her thumbnail, scored out the faces of the people in the pictures so she wouldn’t have to remember them (she carefully left photos of Henri, Sonia, Jacques and Alex alone – she didn’t have to forget them). Someone picked up some of the pieces, glued them back together and stuck them in the album. Initially I assumed it was Sara, having remorsefully mended her photos after destroying them in a fit of high emotion. But my father said it was most likely his father, ‘walking behind her and picking up the pieces of the photos and taping them together as quickly as she could destroy them’. Her husband always thought she was so beautiful, it pained him to see any photos of her destroyed. And then, after her rage had passed and she saw her photos restored, she saved them in her shoebox, where they were safe but she didn’t have to look at them. But whoever did the repairing couldn’t – or didn’t – replace the faces she had gouged out, so in several photos my grandmother is standing in Paris, smiling happily, holding the arm of a man with no face – a ghost, a vanished past.

On 3 June 1937 she sailed on the SS Manhattan from Le Havre to New York, on a ticket Bill sent over for her. ‘Sara Rykfa Glass, draftsman’ was how she was described on the passenger list, and in the box for nationality someone wrote ‘Polish’ only to cross that out and write ‘Heb’ – ‘Hebrew’. As in Poland, her Jewishness was now seen as more relevant than her born nationality. As she sailed off, she watched France fade away, the only place she’d ever been happy. She had nothing to think about over the week-long journey but what she had left behind.

Bill met Sara at the dock. He had a big smile on his face; she did not, but she was relieved that at least the Kellermans weren’t with him. They got in his car and as they drove she focused on the sights around her, trying to familiarise herself with this new land she was expected to call home: the cars, the clothes, the advertisements on billboards in a language she did not understand. Next to her, Bill chattered away in Yiddish over the noise of the engine, and when she finally focused on what he was saying, she realised a couple of things pretty quickly: he was not a millionaire, he did not live on Park Avenue and he did not work in the fashion industry. It turned out he barely knew Alex at all. He lived in Farmingdale, Long Island, where he ran a Texaco gas station. Alex had completely lied to her, and the few sketchy images she’d had of her life in the States – living in the city, sharing a life with someone as interested in fashion as her – dissolved into nothing. Instead, she would be living in the middle of what was essentially nowhere, with a man whose life had no connection to her interests and passions at all. But it was too late to go back, because as soon as she accepted Bill’s ticket and got on the ship her fate was fixed. Two weeks to the day after her ship docked in New York, she became Mrs William Freiman.

IN PARIS, Sara had found a city that encouraged her aspirations and inspired her every day with its beauty. Farmingdale, Long Island, was not Paris. Back in 1937 most of the town’s businesses were located on Main Street: the pharmacy, the hardware store, the bank. Kids rode their bicycles up and down it all day in the summer, swerving around cars parked diagonally in front of glass-fronted stores. People lived on side streets and dead-ends in identical two-storey houses, most of which had an American flag either affixed to the roof or on a pole in the front lawn. There was a cinema in the town but that was mainly for the kids. When the adults wanted entertainment, they would go to one another’s houses for supper and gossip about their neighbours. It was called Farmingdale, Long Island, but it was really Small Town, America.

Farmingdale was formed by a series of early twentieth-century American phenomena. New York, uniquely in the United States back then, had excellent train lines and, as a result, the city was one of the earliest examples of urban flight, with people increasingly moving out of the city and commuting in to work. The American suburbs started to emerge, as immigrants who had arrived in New York in the late nineteenth century realised in the early twentieth century that instead of living in dirty and diseased tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan they could instead move to comparatively bright and spacious houses outside the city. Suburbia is often depicted as quintessential Americana but in many cases it was least partly moulded by immigrants, and Farmingdale was, by the time Sara arrived, largely populated by second-generation working-class German and Italian immigrants, who might not have spoken English at home, but firmly considered themselves to be American. Just as the suburbs were starting to boom in eastern Long Island, the American aviation industry arrived. Long Island was a natural airfield: situated on the west of the Atlantic, close but

not too close to one of America’s biggest cities, with large flat plains for take-offs and landings. When Charles Lindbergh made his famous transatlantic flight in 1927, he took off from Roosevelt Field, 13 miles from Farmingdale. This was the golden age of the American aviation industry and thriving aircraft companies, such as Liberty, Grumman, Republic, Ranger and Fairchild, needed a huge number of workers. This coaxed yet more people out of the city and into the Long Island suburbs. By the mid-1930s, Farmingdale’s population had doubled in twenty years to 3,500.

So Farmingdale looked very American and was shaped by American social shifts. But Sara would also have found it in some ways grimly reminiscent of Chrzanow. Whereas Chrzanow’s name came from the Polish word for horseradish, Farmingdale’s original name was the similarly prosaic Hardscrabble. By the 1930s, it was populated by working-class Catholics and Jews and when Sara arrived it was, despite the nearby aircraft manufacturers, still a largely rural community; many of her neighbours were potato farmers. And while there obviously weren’t pogroms in Farmingdale, there were other problems.

‘There was also a lot of racism in the town,’ William Rappaport, who ran Farmingdale’s pharmacy back then, told me. ‘The John Birch Society had a big presence in Farmingdale, especially during the war. There were marches, meetings and open anti-Semitism. And that made the Jewish community especially tight-knit.’

Alongside the racism, there was, Rappaport said, a suspicion of ‘difference’: ‘Aspirations, cultural interests, all these were seen as weird, and anything that made you different was weird. So even though the city was just a train ride away, no one would think of going there to see a museum or play. You might go to Brooklyn to see relatives, but that was it. Even reading the New York Times was a sign of over-intellectualism,’ he smiled. Instead, people were expected to read the local paper, the Farmingdale Post.