House of Glass

They did their best to protect the next generations from it. Danièle later had children of her own, Alexandre and Natasha de Betak, whom Henri and Sonia adored and often looked after. But they would shoo their grandchildren out of the house when they lit Friday night candles: ‘You don’t need to see this, go outside,’ they would say, shutting the door behind them. If Alexandre or Natasha asked about Judaism, decades after the war ended, Sonia would put her fingers to her lips and say sharply, ‘Better not.’ ‘Don’t tell people you’re Jewish,’ they instructed Alexandre – a sad echo of their late Ornstein cousins, Maurice and Giselle, trying to protect their little son Armand when they hid him in the woods. They just wanted to be French, and for their daughter and grandchildren to be seen as purely French, because to be French was to be safe. Even after being naturalised Henri never entirely believed he was safe and for the rest of his life he would do anything to avoid conflict or drawing attention to himself.

Dinner with Henri and Sonia. Renée Goldberg is smiling at the camera, her daughter, Anne-Laurence, on her lap.

So when Haenel came up with a plan in 1960, he knew he’d be able to get Henri

to agree.

‘Do me a favour,’ he said to Henri one day. ‘My wife, she’s giving me a hard time. She says I really run the company and you’re just the engineer, and so the company should really be mine. I know, I know, but you know women, right? So could you just write a letter saying that you’re signing the company over to me? It won’t mean anything and it will give me more peace at home. Be a friend.’

One of the ironies of Henri’s life is that after the war he became increasingly like the one member of this family whom the Nazis had managed to murder. He adopted some of the tendencies of Jacques that had so infuriated the rest of his family when he was alive and, ultimately, helped to get him killed. It was as if he were paying some kind of homage to Jacques, keeping his closest brother alive by re-enacting him, or it might be simpler than that: Henri’s nervousness was a reaction to how utterly traumatised he had been by the war. It had depleted muscles and pared him back to the bare Glass bones, becoming increasingly like his gentle father. So he didn’t laugh in Haenel’s face, as most people would have done. Instead he agreed to sign the letter. Sonia understood her husband and she also knew she had to protect him. So she said to Henri, ‘Fine, tell him you’ll sign the letter, but only if he signs another letter saying that the other letter is meaningless.’

Haenel agreed to this rather bizarre plan, but when he signed the second letter he crammed his signature into the bottom right corner of the letter, and made it so small it could hardly be seen by the naked eye.

Haenel died soon after signing the letters and in 1962 his wife, in a wholly predictable turn of events, sued Henri for control of Photosia, saying that the first letter he signed proved it was now hers. Henri was terrified: he dreaded going to court up against Madame Haenel’s fancy lawyers, and he had visions of ending up bankrupt, like Jacques had done. Alex, who was by now starting to become very wealthy, immediately hired one of the best lawyers in Paris for his beloved brother. ‘Tout ce que j’ai est à toi,’ he told him – ‘All that I have is yours.’

But ultimately it was Henri’s wife – as had so often been the case before – who came to his rescue.

Madame Haenel insisted Henri hand over the second letter as evidence for the trial, but Sonia stopped him.

‘Haenel’s signature is so small, and right in the corner, that wife of his could flick it off with her thumb and then you’d have nothing,’ she said to her husband.

So Sonia came up with a plan: she put the letter in a thick, transparent plastic envelope, sealed it shut on all four sides, and handed it over to the court like that. Madame Haenel, realising her plan was being thwarted, was furious, and insisted the plastic envelope made the letter too hard to read and was therefore inadmissible. But the judge overruled her and Henri got to keep his 50 per cent of the business.

Henri won the case, but it was now impossible for him and Madame Haenel to run the company together. Fortunately, a large Dutch company, called Van der Grinten,[2] offered to buy it. Henri and Madame Haenel sold Photosia to them in 1966 for almost $12 million, or $50 million today.

Henri was suddenly an extremely wealthy man, one who, at the age of sixty-five, would never need to worry about money again. But the money hardly changed his and Sonia’s lives at all: they continued to travel in economy class, and they didn’t move to a big fancy house. To become a flashy show-off like his brother Alex would have gone completely against Henri’s nature. But if he had always dreamed of wrapping his entire house in gold he wouldn’t have done so because, even in the 1960s, he never felt he could relax; rather, he saw the money as a way to protect himself and his family should things go bad again, as they surely would. He put most of the cash in Swiss bank accounts – away from the French, in case the country turned on him again – and invested in property and art, as protection if currency rates dropped. He and Sonia bought a small weekend house in Neauphle-le-Château, which they loved and kept beautifully maintained. A new neighbour arrived in the late 1970s who was, however, less house-proud and he let his house and lawn deteriorate badly. Sonia complained, but to no avail – her neighbour was, she later recalled, very stubborn. Newspapers from that period also described her neighbour’s ‘unkempt’ garden, because he was not just Henri and Sonia’s neighbour in the countryside – he was the Ayatollah Khomeini, then in exile from Iran. He returned to Tehran in 1979, from where he launched the Iranian Revolution and founded the Islamic Republic of Iran. Many in the west at the time were worried about Khomeini’s return, and with good reason: the effects of it are still felt today throughout the world. But as far as Sonia was concerned his departure meant that her neighbourhood improved, so she was one of the very few in France who wholeheartedly celebrated his departure. Once again, by a quirk of geography, Henri and Sonia had a front-row seat to some of the most formative events of twentieth-century politics.

Henri also allowed himself a small taste of the French style that he’d always admired. When he first got his windfall, he bought a small selection of smart suits, Charvet shirts, tailored pyjamas and custom-made shoes. He also bought an Hermès wallet and, the final treat, a Jaguar car. Henri drove that Jaguar for twenty years, only giving it up when he thought his age made him a risk on the road. He wore those clothes to the day he died, and his grandson Alexandre still wears some of them now. This was Henri’s small expression of defiance: after so many years of deprivation, he at last had the money and freedom to enjoy himself, and he did. But it could also be seen as a show of submission: after all this time, Henri was still desperately keen to pass as a Frenchman, to be assimilated, to be accepted.

SALA, LIKE HENRI, also wanted to be seen as French. She never loved the country less for what it did to her family during the war because, somehow, she was able to separate what the country symbolised to her and what it had actually done. But Sala’s deep desire to be seen as French had as much to do with America as it did with France.

Like Henri’s, her post-war life was about raising her family. She made a life for herself in Farmingdale: she was polite enough to Bill’s family and, in particular, helped to look after his mother, Rosy. She started painting again, and would spend the afternoons while the boys were at school working on canvasses in the living room, creating beautiful French girls in the Long Island suburbs, who were perhaps an expression of her frustrated desire for a daughter, her own idealised self-image or maybe simply a grasp at a connection to the past when she would look at such girls in the Paris museums with her older brother. She got to know her neighbours and, most of all, she threw herself into the boys’ lives, always making sure they were beautifully dressed and that her home looked perfect. Dr Brenner, her cousin Rose’s husband, moved nearby, and he became the doctor for the family. Years later, Alex Ornstein came to visit and Bill drove him, along with his son Ron, to Dr Brenner’s house, where Alex’s sister Rose should have been living with him. My father Ron remembers watching Alex and Dr Brenner falling into one another’s arms in tears, two men who should have been lifelong brothers-in-law had the war not swept away the woman who connected them.

Sala and Bill bickered at times, and these fights were all underpinned by the central conflict in their relationship: she did not love him like he wanted her to. She started to take long naps during the day, gratefully losing the hours to unconsciousness.

‘Why is your mother always sleeping?’ Bill would demand of his sons, his snappishness a cover for his hurt. But there was no good answer.

Yet Sala did not succumb to the paralysis of depression. Like so many immigrants before and after her, she decided that even if she didn’t understand this strange land in which she found herself, she would ensure that her children had a better life there than she ever could. She made sure they always felt not just loved but secure, as she had not when she lived in fear in Chrzanow. She spoke to them in French, raising them bilingual, and taught them about French art and food and culture, determined to expand their mental horizons beyond Farmingdale. But she also made sure they succeeded in America. She read to them often, in English and French, and even though she herself had barely been to school at all, she, along with Bill, drilled the importance of education into both of them. The result of all this intensive home schooling was that her elder son, Ronald, could read years before the rest of his classmates. But the teachers in Farmingdale’s local school had neither the time nor willingness to deal with students of varying abilities, so repeatedly reprimanded him for getting ahead of the class, trying in vain to rein him back to the level of his classmates. When Ronald was seven, not long after he came back from that first trip to Paris, he was in an English class and wilting with boredom as he listened to his fellow pupils slowly stammer their way through the set text, which they took turns reading aloud. To pass the time, he silently read ahead in the book.

‘Don’t read ahead, Ronald!’ the teacher barked. But Ronald was so bored he didn’t listen.

‘I said stop it!’ the teacher said and gave him a whack over the head.

Bill, still the fighter from the Lower East Side, had taught his boys that if someone hit them they should always stand up for themselves and hit back. He hadn’t told them what to do if the person doing the hitting was a teacher, but his instruction probably wouldn’t have changed that much. So Ronald, proving he really was Bill’s son and Alex’s nephew, pulled his fist back, and punched his teacher in the stomach.

Corporal punishment in New York public schools wouldn’t be banned until 1985, so Ronald’s teacher had another forty

years ahead of her in which she could wallop kids as much as she desired. But while teachers hitting kids was completely fine, kids hitting teachers was considered completely outrageous. After Ronald punched his teacher the school called Sala and informed her that her son was probably ‘mentally retarded’. They would need a psychologist to test him and if the tests came back positive they would send him to a special school. Terrified, Sala awaited the psychologist’s verdict. After a long hour of waiting outside his office, while he asked Ronald a seemingly endless series of questions, the psychologist emerged and sat beside her.

‘Mrs Freiman, there is nothing wrong with your son, except that he has the highest IQ I’ve ever tested,’ the psychologist told her.

Sala then began to formulate a plan to get her boys out of this small town that she knew would only stifle them.

Not long after the meeting with the psychologist, Ronald came home from school one day, went to his father and asked, ‘Dad, what’s a kike?’ A group of bigger boys had shouted anti-Semitic abuse at him on his way home from school. It was at this point that my father, like Henri, started to see his Jewishness as akin to a club foot, something he had been burdened with through no fault of his own, and it was a feeling he would never entirely shake off.

That Ronald experienced anti-Semitic bullying in Farmingdale was not a surprise: when Bill first moved there the Ku Klux Klan was still thriving. Even in the 1940s, Jews in Farmingdale kept to themselves and were seen as separate from the rest of the town, and there was a sense of a soft segregation. ‘There was a level of anti-Semitism, but nothing publicly demonstrated. Just the usual thing, certain organisations not open to Jews and black people then,’ William Rappaport, who owned the pharmacy in Farmingdale then, told me. ‘Jews followed their usual ways by not doing anything that would result in problems and kept a low profile.’

Bill and Sala were both much less religious than their parents and they reflected the increasing shift towards assimilation among Jews in mid-century America: they went to synagogue on the High Holy Days, but not for Shabbat; they sent their boys to Hebrew school but Sala’s attempts to keep kosher when she arrived in America soon faded away. Bill in particular bucked against the restrictive religious binds in which he had been raised, but after the war, when the Jews of Farmingdale gathered up their courage and their money and decided to build a synagogue, despite the local bigots, it was Bill who spearheaded the fundraising for it. He even laid its cornerstone on which his name was engraved. So although he wasn’t observant, being Jewish was a central part of his identity and while other Jews tried to keep their heads down and not stir up trouble, Bill was always more like Alex than Henri.