House of Glass

The only contact she had with anyone vaguely connected to her old life was her occasional correspondence with Alex’s friend Kisling, who was then living in California, but he was just as ignorant about her family’s wellbeing as she was. He wrote to her from Beverly Hills on 6 December 1942:

My dear Mrs Freiman,

I think of you often, I think of poor Alex from whom you are cut off, I think of the worries that is causing you. Really, we have no luck, my poor friend. Each of us who is born over there we are bearing a cross but what can we do? The only weapon we have is hope for this will soon be over and that we will find them all soon again. If you have a moment send me your news, I don’t dare ask you the news of Alex of which you probably have more information than me.

I hope your husband is well, as well as your charming child,

Maurice Kisling (Kiki)

Bill took hundreds of photos of her in this era: despite all their fighting, and her disappointing lack of affection, he was always so proud of his beautiful French bride, who made their home so much more stylish than those of his siblings. But few have looked more like a stranger in a strange land than my grandmother in these photos: always in her distinctly French clothing and always standing next to various forms of Americana – a flag, a diner, a supersize car – she is like an exotic explorer among the natives. In one of my favourite photos of my grandmother, taken in 1941, she is wearing a jaunty little three-cornered hat with a peaked top and a beautiful belted coat with exaggerated lapels that was made by Alex. As ever, she is in heels and her make-up and hair are perfect, and she is bending over a little boy – my father – in a snow suit. She could be a young mother in the Tuileries, or on the Champs-Élysées – except she is standing next to a gas pump because she is at my grandfather’s gas station in Farmingdale. A friend of mine used to refer to this photo as ‘granny at the gas station’, but I think of it more as Dorothy back in black and white Kansas, but in this version she never wanted to leave technicolour Oz.

Sara and Ronald.

In December 1943 Sara gave birth to her second child – another boy. As she lay in bed recovering from the birth she listened to the news reports about the Battle of Berlin, in which, on 17 December, the Royal Air Force nearly destroyed Berlin’s railway system. The Royal Air Force – RAF. The initials kept being repeated on the report: these were the people who were trying to save Europe from the people killing her family, Sara thought. RAF. She named her baby Richard Allen Freiman, known as Rich.

Sara had longed for a girl, whom she could dress in pretty clothes and whose long hair she could style. A girl who could be her confidante, her friend. But she adored her sons, and she poured the love she couldn’t give to her husband into her boys. She was a demonstratively affectionate mother, naturally gentle and loving but also desperate to justify to herself the choice she had made that resulted in them being born. If she loved them enough, if they loved her enough, maybe it would have been worth it.

The story of my grandmother confused people – particularly, I noticed, Jewish Americans who generally, and understandably, assume that any story about escaping the war by coming to America is a happy one. That narrative is a cornerstone of the Jewish American story, yet Sara’s story complicated it. When I was ten, I gave a presentation about the Glasses to my Hebrew school class in New York, and although I didn’t really have the words to describe my grandmother’s unhappiness, I knew enough to say that she’d never wanted to leave Paris.

Sara with Ronald and Richard in Farmingdale, mid-1940s.

‘But of course she was happy once she got to America, whereas her brothers were very unfortunate to be in France,’ my teacher, Ms Meyers, concluded for me, thinking she was being helpful.

I thought of my grandmother, stuck in Miami at that point, still homesick after half a century. And I thought of my great-uncles, Alex and Henri, who were by then happy and wealthy in Paris. Individual lives are always more complicated than sweeps of history, but how could I explain this to Miss Meyers, in my Hebrew school classroom that, by way of interior decor, had a picture of the gates of Auschwitz on one wall? I didn’t want to give the wrong answer. So I nodded and sat down at my desk.

Sara had done what she’d had to in order to survive the war. But in saving herself she lost everything that had made her life worth living. Other things took their place – her children, eventually her grandchildren – so I can’t say she made the wrong choice, and she would never have said that either. But no, she wasn’t happy when she got to America. She was grateful to it for the safety it provided her and the material comforts it brought her. But looking at the photos of her in Farmingdale – her make-up so perfect, her face so sad – it’s clear the price she paid for survival was painfully high. ‘S

he moved to America but, emotionally, she never really unpacked her bags there,’ my father said. Sara endured a specifically female tragedy: she gave up not just her true love but her dreams and professional fulfilment in exchange for protection by marriage. Alex got a medal for going to war and Jacques could send Sara his metal prison plate. But no one was going to give her any plaudits for what she did. While her brothers performed the traditionally masculine roles of carrying out acts of extraordinary bravery, Sara endured the more feminine role of private self-erasure.

Yet as unhappy as she was, divorce was never an option for her. Americans certainly got divorced in the 1940s – in fact the divorce rate spiked after the Second World War, when couples who had rushed to marry before the war quickly regretted that decision when the men returned from fighting. But the stigma was still terrible, and, like many women of her generation and afterwards, Sara could in no way survive as the single mother of two without any kind of familial support. Anyway, that was not what Jewish women like her did. She knew what her role was now: it was to make Bill’s meals and look after her boys. When she moved to America, Sara’s internal life split: outwardly, she existed in the present but inside she was always thinking of what had been and what could have been, if the war hadn’t happened, if she’d stayed and somehow survived, if she moved back there now, if if if. She’d only had a few years of happiness in Paris, and even fewer healthy and happy ones, a mere blink. But the ghosts from those years haunted her. After the war, she promised herself, she would go back to Paris. And thus began Sara’s long wait, one that would be much longer than she realised at the time, for her life to begin again.

Bill (front and centre).

7

BILL – America

New York, 1900s–1930s

BILL HAD NEVER expected or even especially wanted to go to France, or, as he called it, ‘Europe’. But when his neighbours, Oscar and Rosa Kellerman, invited him to come with them on a business trip, he thought, Hey, you only live once. So he tagged along, just for the hell of it.

Except it was possibly for more than the hell of it. Bill was an extremely handsome man, and a good-looking single guy of thirty-five in a small town will attract the eyes of the ladies, one of the ladies whose eyes he caught being Rosa Kellerman. Whether Bill and Rosa actually had an affair no one will ever know, but Sara never forgot how much Rosa flirted with him when she met them in Paris. When I asked my father about it he said that thinking about the way Rosa would still moon around his dad, years after the trip to Paris, reminded him of The Bridges of Madison County, ‘not that I would confuse Rosa Kellerman with Meryl Streep’. Certainly the ships’ passenger lists suggest something was up between them. Even though the Kellermans travelled to Europe frequently for their work in the clothing trade – three times in 1937 alone – they never travelled together. Instead, when Rosa sailed to France from New York in December 1936, her husband had sailed a month earlier. But a certain William Freiman sailed two days after her from the same dock. And when she sailed back in February 1937, she left from Cherbourg. William’s ship also left from Cherbourg, a few days later, but her husband, Oscar, didn’t return to Farmingdale until April, and he sailed from Southampton. Were William and Rosa staying together in New York and Cherbourg? Sara would have said yes.

If Bill went to France in 1936 to enjoy a flirtation with a married woman under her husband’s nose it wouldn’t have been wildly out of character. Bill was many things – funny, handsome, ambitious – but perhaps his most notable quality back then was mischievousness. He was the baby boy in his family, the fourth of five, and he always had a reputation as the cheeky one and a flirt. Among my grandmother’s belongings I found a photo of him judging what is clearly a beauty competition. He is standing on stage in a suit holding a microphone, his dark hair slicked back, and on either side of him is a woman in a bathing suit, each wearing a sash that reads 1936, the year before he sailed to Paris. His pencil moustache is stretching out with his wide smile. He looks pretty pleased with himself.

He and Oscar Kellerman were not close friends – in fact, they hardly socialised at all. But Oscar had learned from his last trip to Paris that he would need to bring someone who spoke either Yiddish or French in order to talk to the fashion merchants there, and it was a lot easier to find a Yiddish speaker than a French one in Farmingdale. It was not explained to Bill that he would be acting as an unpaid translator on this trip; instead, he planned to ditch the Kellermans as soon as they docked in France so he could tour the country by motorcycle and ski in the Alps. But, they told him, if he wanted his return ticket that would have to wait until after their meeting with this Maguy fellow.

The Kellermans owned a wholesale clothing business and the reason they travelled to Paris so often was to buy patterns and fabrics on the cheap. Alex had become one of their pattern suppliers, because it was by doing jobs like this that he was able to keep his couture business afloat. He schmoozed the people who ran these companies, but he loathed selling his beautiful designs to what he described as ‘those schmatte merchants’, tacky Americans who would tell him to design a sleeve differently so that it wouldn’t drag in their macaroni cheese.

But one American Alex liked right away was Bill. ‘Your grandfather was a smart man,’ he would tell me, even though they hardly ever saw one another due to Bill’s longstanding belief that he’d been to Europe once and there was no need for him to go again. Bill couldn’t have given Alex any money, and he certainly didn’t have any power when Alex met him, so I often wondered at Alex’s fondness for my grandfather. After all, the number of people Alex truly liked could be counted on one hand, and Bill was very much one of them. He was smart, no question, and tall, which was always an important factor for Alex. But Alex’s feelings for Bill seemed to go beyond mere facts and I suspect they lay in how they met, which was through the Kellermans.

Bill disliked Oscar Kellerman about as much as Alex, and neither of them was any good at disguising their feelings. Alex used to recall how he liked Bill so much when he met him with the Kellermans that he invited him over for dinner, and it’s easy for me to imagine how that original meeting went, with Bill translating for the Kellermans and him and Alex quickly understanding their mutual loathing of these cheap clothing merchants.

‘Tell that piece of dirt that he can go to hell if he thinks he’s getting this pattern for less than 40 francs,’ I could picture Alex saying.

‘How about 30 francs if he promises his wife won’t wear it?’ Bill would have responded.

‘Deal!’