House of Glass

Hadley and Alex Maguy.

Sala had always assumed she would move back to Paris when Bill died, and, thwarting her to the end, he managed to stay in the ruddiest of health up until his ninetieth birthday. But just as the once strappingly athletic Bill began to weaken with age, and the life Sala had dreamed about for decades was a mere breath away, it was, once again, snatched away from her.

Sala had said to several relatives and friends over the years that her greatest fear was being physically immobile but mentally alert. This happened to a rabbi she knew, who was struck down by cerebral haemorrhage, and although Sala often visited him often in hospital, his fate terrified her: ‘God forbid that should happen to me,’ she said to Rich. She had been trapped by circumstances for so long, the idea of being constrained even further, and all too aware of the constraints on her, must have been terrifyingly real and horrific. And with bitter inevitability, that is exactly what happened to her.

Where Bill had always been hardy, Sala was delicate, careless with her health and always happier feeding others than herself. She hated anyone fussing over her and regarded any efforts to remedy her ailments as unnecessary and embarrassing. So it was no surprise to her family that she often neglected to take the medicine her doctor prescribed for her high blood pressure. What none of us realised was that this then put her at risk of a stroke, and after a few minor ones she was finally felled by a major one. In one blow, it stilled her body and her tongue. All she could do for the rest of her life was wave her right arm and anxiously repeat the babyish sound ‘la’. But her eyes were all too alert, and they wept in frustration.

The last time I saw my grandmother – both of my grandparents, for that matter – was in 1991, not long after my bat mitzvah. My parents took my sister and me to their Miami apartment, which I’d always remembered as elegant, decorated carefully by my grandmother and filled with her art posters. This time I walked into a modern geriatric nightmare. My once seemingly indomitable grandfather was laid out on the sofa, the muscles he’d once been so proud of all wasted away. Now it was the hard knots of his joints that bulged out, visible even through his blanket. My grandmother was even more unrecognisable, her normally perfect lipstick and hair now crooked and askew. She couldn’t have looked more unnervingly wrong if she’d been naked. The apartment, which she had always kept meticulously tidy, was cluttered with medical detritus: bottles, charts, packs of tubing, piles of plastic sheeting and two wheelchairs, one for each of them. There also seemed to be about a dozen nurses rushing around, but in truth there were only two, each trying in vain to get their patients to take their pills. And while the rest of us – my parents, my sister, my uncle Rich and I – were dazed by the chaos, my grandparents carried on as usual, which is to say they were quarrelling. Sala sat in an armchair and made do with the little at her disposal, shouting, ‘La la la la,’ while pointing furiously at Bill with her one mobile arm. Bill, on the sofa, waved his hand impatiently back at her: ‘Be quiet, Sala!’ he said.

‘Look, your grandmother is pointing at your grandfather – she’s saying she loves him!’ my grandmother’s nurse said to my sister and me with a reassuring smile. My sister Nell and I were only, respectively, eleven and thirteen, but we knew: Sala was not telling Bill she loved him. She was saying she blamed him.

Sala had never exactly hidden her unhappiness, but she’d been so good at keeping it in check, ensuring the roil of emotions stayed just beneath her skin. It was terrifying to see all that now unleashed, all the anger, anxiety and frustration that had built up over her lifetime, and not even her sons could calm her down. The only person who could soothe her was Betty, my grandparents’ housekeeper who had been with them since they moved to Miami.

‘Come on, Sala. Come on,’ said Betty, sitting on the armchair, holding her close. And Sala collapsed against her, her eyes closed, like a daughter cleaving to her much longed-for mother.

Bill died the next year, of many things but really just of old age. The fearsome fighter from the Lower East Side had fought until his tenth decade and, in many ways, won. Once hi

s mother could barely afford to give him more than a meal a day, but by the time he died he had more than $1 million in the bank, thanks entirely to his skill at investing and indefatigable work ethic. Life had probably not worked out exactly as he wanted, but he never let it get him down. He had left behind the drag of his origins, made money, had a beautiful wife and successful sons. In his eyes he was a winner, and he was right.

I didn’t go to his funeral, because by that point I was in hospital for anorexia. My grandmother might have understood that affliction better than anyone in our family, given that her own relationship with food could be described at best as complicated. But I never spoke to her about it, because she couldn’t speak then. My father, of course, went to Bill’s funeral, and he and Rich brought Sala, in her wheelchair. She cried throughout the service.

‘Look how sad she is that her husband died,’ other people whispered in awe. But she wasn’t sad that Bill had died. She was sad that the day she had waited for had finally come, and it didn’t matter any more. All those fantasies of living in Paris, travelling to London, to Israel – all gone.

Two years later, she had a massive stroke and was rushed to hospital, where doctors stuck so many tubes in her she looked more like a science experiment than the woman she was, adhering to the American medical establishment’s belief that maintaining life is more important than considering what quality that life will have. Rich was at the hospital one afternoon with Betty, my grandparents’ housekeeper, and the doctors said she was crashing and they would need to revive her again. He was about to sign the papers when Betty put her hand on his.

‘Let her go, Richard,’ she said.

Rich loved his mother more than anything on earth, but he also knew Betty was right. So he went to Sala’s bed and held her close. He whispered that we all knew how much she had sacrificed for all of us, that she had given up her life so that we could all live. That we loved her, and he kissed her goodbye, from all of us. For the first time in God knows how long, Rich saw her make a small smile. And then she was free.

Few get good endings, and Sala definitely did not get the one she deserved. She had wanted to die in Europe, the continent of her birth and where her heart still was. Instead, she had a hideous protracted death in an American hospital, far from the place she still thought of as home, fifty years after leaving it behind. As children, my sister and I used to whisper to one another at night about how we wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Hitler, and my father told me he used to think about that too. Because if it hadn’t been for the war, Sala would never have married Bill and the rest of us wouldn’t even be cells or ether. For a while this added another dimension to my already well-hewn sense of Jewish guilt: I lived only because of the pain and loss of others, and the pain of one person in particular – Sala. However, she would not have ever seen it that way. To her, our existence was what gave her loss, and her life, meaning. Her sons and grandchildren were not compensation for what she left behind; we were the explanation for it. She asked for nothing as a reward for her sacrifice, because she never asked for anything. She stayed on the side of the room, against the walls, in the shadows, loving us, erasing herself and her needs. But the one thing that she wanted, and expected, was to live back in Europe one day, with us, with Alex, on her own. And ultimately, even that was denied to her, because after giving up her dreams to come to America, her death there was her actual nightmare. Pretty little Sala Glahs, whose father used to buy her frilly dresses from the market, who wanted nothing more than to feel well enough to play with her brothers outside on Kostalista, deserved a better end.

SONIA, on the other hand, managed to have one of the best deaths of all time.

After Henri died, Sonia proved that, despite being in an extremely close and happy marriage for more than half a century, she was more than capable of leading a contented independent life. She busied herself every day spending time with friends, walking her beloved dogs and, most of all, playing bridge. She occasionally went on bridge cruises – boat trips where she and other like-minded bridge fans played cards all day; she sent back photos of herself flanked by the young and handsome male crew. Sonia had loved Henri dearly, but she was – as everyone knew she would be – fine without him.

Sonia with friends.

Then one day in 1995, she went to her regular bridge game in Paris and brought her daughter Danièle with her. She took her seat at a card table and suddenly had a thought: ‘Table seven! That’s my lucky number,’ she said, turning to her daughter. Then she turned back, keeled over and was instantly dead. Sonia was never one for dragging things out unnecessarily.

Helen, Nell, Ronald and Hadley Freeman with Alex in Cannes in 1992.

Seven was also Alex’s lucky number, but he did not get quite as lucky a death. He was the last Glass standing, although by the end he was so frail he could barely stand at all. Not even those who fought against pogroms and Nazis can beat old age. The last time my father saw him was in 1999, when Alex summoned him to Paris to visit him. My father found him sitting in front of his apartment building on the Avenue Foch, so depleted with age he was like a balloon with half the air taken out. In order for Alex to stand up and then walk around his beloved private garden, my father had to support his whole weight, and that amounted to hardly anything.

Alex died in October 1999. French death announcements in the newspapers are often written in florid and formal language, but Alex’s was oddly apt. In Le Figaro, on 3 November 1999, a small article appeared, announcing the end of Alex Maguy Glass’s ‘tormented and ostentatious existence’, summing up his beginning and his end. He’d told my father that he wanted to be buried by the Chrzanow Burial Society in Montparnasse Cemetery, alongside other Chrzanovians who had, through the twists of history and geopolitics, died in Paris. In Paris, he was friends with many of the greatest stars of the mid-century. But at heart, he was still little Sender, being cheeky to his family as they walked to synagogue together in Chrzanow, and in the end he wanted to be with the people who reminded him of his father.

Alex de Betak and Hadley, in Los Angeles at a fashion event Alex produced.

14

THE NEXT GENERATIONS – An Epilogue

Paris, the twenty-first century

THE GLASSES spanned the twentieth century, from Henri’s birth in 1901 to Alex’s death in 1999. They lived through probably the most dramatic shifts ever endured by the world’s Jews, from the Holocaust to American immigration to the founding of Israel to assimilation, and their lives reflected it all. On an individual level, they took chances that are unimaginable to their children and grandchildren today, because we live in comfort that they created for us. But once they all died, whatever thin strands that connected us fell away entirely: Danièle and her children seemed to drift away from us – or us from them – and I certainly didn’t know anyone connected to the Ornstein cousins. Part of this was undoubtedly laziness – my father can be especially bad at keeping in touch with extended family members – but it felt also like a reaction to the Glasses themselves.

There have been many studies about inherited trauma, looking at whether children of, for example, prisoners of war die earlier than children of soldiers who evade capture.[1] One study claiming that Holocaust survivors pass on trauma to their children and grandchildren through epigenetics[2] received a huge amount of excited coverage when it was published in 2016. But it was also criticised for, among other things, its tiny sample size,[3] and the shakiness of the science[4] (trans-generational epigenetic inheritance is well-established in plants, but decidedly less so in humans). I haven’t studied science since I was sixteen, so my scepticism about the relevance of genetically inherited trauma to my family’s story is based on something far more basic than epigenetics: knowing what my family is like.

The second generation – Ronald, Rich and Danièle – grew up with an instinctive understanding that their parents did not want to talk about the past, and it wasn’t genetic inheritance that gave them this knowledge. The