House of Glass

ut Alex was adamant Picasso had told him this and, if Picasso did believe it, it would explain Picasso’s well-established and longstanding loyalty to Jewish people, exemplified on an individual level by his friendship with Alex.

De Gaulle and Picasso were probably the two men Alex respected most in the world, and both stood up against fascism during the war. Their opposite reactions to the Six-Day War show how two people, even those ostensibly on the same side, could find themselves so divided when it came to the subject of Jews and, in particular, Israel. This split arguably developed in the way we still know it because of the Six-Day War, in itself a defining part of the Jewish story in the late twentieth century and still today. Israel’s victory aggravated Palestinian frustration and, in turn, nationalism. Palestinians now knew that other Arab countries couldn’t and wouldn’t help them regain territories now held by Israel, such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights, and this led to an escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is still all too ongoing. Israel’s response to this conflict has shaped its own identity and has led the country down a militaristic, far-right path that is far from the dream Alex and many other Jews harboured for it. Alex was right to take a stand against de Gaulle’s cruel comments about Jews in regard to Israel’s actions in the Six-Day War; how Israel reacted after the war led many others to say similar things and worse.

WHEN I FIRST FOUND the shoebox at the back of my grandmother’s closet, there was only one object that made immediate sense to me. I didn’t know who the bespectacled man in the photos was, or what that metal plate saying ‘GLASS, Prisonnier Cambrai’ referred to, or why the Red Cross was writing to Sala in 1944 – but I knew exactly how my quiet, self-effacing grandmother acquired a Picasso drawing. That’s because it came from the one member of the Glass family who was always happy to talk about his achievements and who achieved the kind of things that were written about in history books. What I couldn’t understand was why she had it or why she had hidden it in her closet.

Alex introduced Sala to Picasso while she was on a trip to France in the late 1960s, and she was even more excited to meet the artist than Alex was the first time he went to Villa Californie. There is only one photo of her with Picasso and, although he is looking elsewhere while shaking her hand, perhaps for someone a little more interesting than a housewife, she is positively shining with happiness. If meeting Picasso was a kind of self-validating success for Alex, for Sala it was proof that there existed a life out there where dreams really did come true, and that life was in Paris. She never said anything, but her trips back to France, which she took every other year or so, must have been almost impossibly painful for her: yes, going to America had possibly saved her life, but she surely looked at Henri and Alex and wondered maybe if she’d stayed whether she, too, would be living glamorous lives like her brothers, instead of being a suburban American housewife. They had been able to take active control over their lives and climbed up the social ladder in ways she’d longed to do too. But her role in life, as a woman from a traditional Jewish background, was to stay in the background, behind her husband.

Sala and Picasso.

Chaya’s death in 1964 quietly devastated Sala: despite her and her mother’s differences, they loved one another very deeply, and being on a different continent when her mother finally passed away in a retirement home in France that Henri and Alex had found for her when she got too old to live on her own in Israel, must have made Sala feel even lonelier. She paid for a death notice in the New York Times, even though no one else in America knew who Chaya was.[26] But that didn’t matter to Sala, she wanted to make a public statement of her grief and for her mother’s death to not pass unnoticed. Shortly after this, Sala went through one of her periodic ‘blue’ phases, and when Alex heard about this, he asked Picasso for a little sketch that he could send her. Picasso obliged, and he even signed it, which he often omitted to do with sketches, much to the frustration of dealers and collectors.

Until the end of her life, Alex sent Sala pictures, and she loved to brag to visitors about the priceless art her famous brother in Paris gave her. After she died we took down her pictures and out of their frames, and while some of them were worth something – some prints by Soutine, some by Vlaminck – others were worthless posters from art exhibitions. For years I assumed that my grandmother had been deceived by her brother with these posters, but after finding the Picasso in her closet, reading her letters to Alex and Henri and spending so long in Alex’s head by reading his memoir, I realised I was too harsh in my judgement, of both Alex and my grandmother. Sala was not self-deluding. She, alone among the Glass siblings, had been happy to go along with Alex’s exaggerations, fudges and self-mythologies, because she understood her brother. She knew that he loved his family, and that his ability to show it had its limits, so when Alex revealed something real, it had to be cherished and protected. That’s why when he sent her a sketch by Picasso, she didn’t hang it up for all to see: she kept it in her closet, where only she knew about it for the rest of her life. Here was real evidence of how extraordinary their lives were, that they had started in a shtetl in Poland, and now he was sending to her home in America a drawing by one of the greatest artists of all time, just for her. It was their secret and her secret, and like so many other things, she kept it that way until she died.

Hadley, Sala and Bill, in about 1980.

13

THE END OF THE GLASS SIBLINGS

Paris and Miami, 1980s and 1990s

AS THEY ENTERED their fourth decade of marriage, Bill and Sala developed a kind of mutual dependence that could, from certain angles, be seen as love. Sala in particular felt a real marital loyalty to him that ultimately meant she was never at ease, wherever she was: when she was with him, she was dreaming of her family in Paris; when she was in Paris, she fretted about whether Bill had enough to eat at home. She was in a constant battle between her desires and her obligations.

A mutual respect had grown between them: they understood each other and in many ways appreciated one another’s qualities as a spouse and parent. And yet, friends would say the two of them could argue over the oxygen in the air, and this was barely an exaggeration: one of their most frequent arguments was over the thermostat in their apartment. It was never too hot for Bill, whereas Sala liked it cool and fresh, and as fast as he would turn the radiator dial up she would turn it down, horrified at how cloyingly claustrophobic he made her home. But in 1973 it looked like he had definitively won the temperature argument when he announced they were moving to Miami, Florida. The family had often gone there on holidays and the reasons Bill loved Miami (the golf, the heat) were the same reasons Sala hated it (the lack of culture, the heat). But she went along with the move. She knew how much he wanted to go and when he was like this there was no arguing against him. It would, after all, be better for his health than the bitter East Coast winters, and maybe there was a part of her that thought, given Bill was now in his seventies, she might not be there for too long.

Once she was there, Miami turned out to have its advantages. She loved their apartment, with the ready-made community inside the building of other older Jewish couples with whom she could play cards and go shopping, and she especially enjoyed the local Jewish delis where she could buy lox and challah. While Bill played golf all day, she made a life for herself, introducing herself to everyone in the building and teaching them backgammon on the beach. When Bill stayed at home in the evenings, she went to the ballet, the theatre and every exhibition of French art. They led busy if separate lives. (She also valiantly maintained her side of the battle of the air temperature, insistently turning the air conditioner up as high as it would go in every room of their apartment, while he would turn it off behind her, barking in frustration.) She made a young friend, named Stephanie, who was the same age as her sons, and the two of them liked to go on shopping trips together, during which Sala would try on miniskirts that Stephanie would never have dared to try on herself, and she alway

s looked wonderful. When Stephanie told her one day that she was leaving her husband, despite the disapproval of their friends, Sala looked at the ground and said quietly, ‘You have great courage.’

Hadley and Bill, in about 1986.

Best of all, their younger son Rich soon also moved to Miami to work as a lawyer. Just as each of the Glass siblings reacted so differently to what they went through during the war, so Sala’s sons reacted in their own individual ways to their parents. Sala and Bill poured the love they couldn’t give one another into their boys, but whereas Ronald found this at times overbearing and eventually moved overseas, Rich stayed close. Even as a popular bachelor about town, he saw his parents almost every day, and when he went to work during the day as a lawyer, Sala would often come to his apartment to restock his refrigerator. She loved doing this as much as he appreciated that she did it. (The Freeman boys, like the Glass siblings, are an eloquent argument in favour of nature over nurture when it comes to explaining a person’s character. Despite having an identical upbringing, Ronald and Rich are in many ways as different as Alex and Jacques.)

What Sala really liked about Miami was the view from her living room. Their apartment was on the seventh floor, and faced the beach. Sala could stand at the window for hours, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean she had crossed so many years ago, gazing back towards her beloved France and home. But a few years after they moved in, a developer built an identical apartment building across the street, between her and the sea, and she watched the progress of the work creeping up closer and closer to her window. One day they were at level pegging, her and the builders. Then the new building was finished, blocking her view of the ocean, and she looked out of the window no more.

Over in Paris, once Danièle’s son Alexandre de Betak was too old to be dragged to lunches with Alex Maguy, Henri and Alex saw each other less and less. Sonia and Alex, despite living just a few miles away from one another for most of their lives, never saw one another at all. It was up to Sala, far away in Miami, to hold the disparate pieces of her family together. (‘Such esprit de famille,’ Sonia would grumble when Sala came to Paris and insisted on seeing everyone.) But by the early 1980s even Sala was struggling to hold the family together. She wrote to Henri and Sonia on 15 September 1982:

Ron wants to buy us an apartment in the building opposite ours, because that building hides our view, so it’s logical. Unfortunately, where Ron sees only the positives his father sees only the negatives and says it would be hard to sell ours, with interest rates so high. But, I really want it.

I just heard some terrible news. Terrorists in Lebanon. Princess Grace. What a tragedy. So sad. And how is our Alex Maguy behaving? He ignores me completely. Not a word since May or June. What a disgrace. Still, I miss you all very much.

Sala lost the argument about the apartment, but she won something more important, which was a promise from both her brothers and her sister-in-law that they would all take a holiday together, for the first time in their lives. This became the trip to Deauville, which my parents and sister went on too, and was the first time I met Alex, Henri and Sonia.

Not long after that holiday, the Glasses began to fall apart physically. Henri first, when he was diagnosed with cancer. He was deep into his eighties by now and his health deteriorated quickly. Sonia didn’t want him to know what he was suffering from, so no one was allowed to mention his illness in front of him, even as Henri was visibly fading away in front of them, and he clearly knew he was dying. Finally, in 1989, Jehuda Glahs, the most studious boy in the Chrzanow shtetl, died. But he was a student to the end: on his bedside table when he died was a ‘teach yourself English’ book, so that he could talk to my sister and me on our next visit.

Henri and Sonia in Paris, 1980s.

The loss of her oldest brother was heartbreaking for Sala, and Alex made it immeasurably worse. When he turned up at Henri’s funeral, he pushed past Sala, Ronald, Danièle and the rest of his family and shouted at Sonia.

‘You killed my brother!’ he yelled, pointing a furious finger at her, shaking off all his family members trying to pull him away. ‘I’d have taken him to America where I know the best doctors, but you insisted on staying here and you killed him! He’s dead because of you. I will never forgive you!’

Alex had been hating Sonia for so long by this point, he probably no longer even remembered why. He never thought she was worthy of Henri, that was obvious, but the hate went deeper than that. Almost fifty years after Jacques’s death, Alex was still blaming his sisters-in-law for taking his brothers away from him. In his mind, if these awful Polish women had just left his family alone, his brothers would have lived for ever.

Danièle’s son, Alexandre de Betak, then just twenty-one, jumped up between his grieving grandmother and raging great-uncle. He had always liked Alex, and Alex had liked him, treating him as a surrogate son. But now, Alexandre glared at him. ‘Get out of here and never talk to my grandmother again. You are not a part of our family any more,’ Alexandre said.

Alex only saw Sonia, Danièle and her children, Alexandre and Natasha, once more after that: at my bat mitzvah. All of them travelled to London, where I was living by then, but they studiously ignored one another all day. When the photographer asked everyone to come together for a family photo, Alex refused to pose with Sonia, so he is the absence in the middle of the family portrait in the garden. Instead, he posed for a photo on his own with me in the living room.

Top row: Ann’s partner Morty, Ronald Freeman, Alexandre de Betak. Middle row: Richard Freeman, Ann Horowitz, Danièle de Betak, Natasha de Betak, Sonia, Helen Freeman. Bottom row: Hadley Freeman, Nell Freeman.