House of Glass

Chrzanow was a typical early twentieth-century eastern European shtetl, or Jewish village, the kind that’s so familiar from popular culture that even those who lived there describe it through the prism of art, flattening reality to something close to cliché. The very few times my grandmother referred to her childhood she talked about it in reference to Fiddler on the Roof, and the memoir of a townsperson who lived there at the same time as the Glahs siblings described its picturesque side streets as looking ‘like those in Chagall’s paintings, poor and crooked’.[1] When I visited Chrzanow in 2018 my guide compared it to the towns in stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. But Chrzanow has its own unique qualities that lift it beyond the generic. Back when the Glahses lived there it was known for its surrounding dark forests of densely packed silver birch trees where the children would hide to avoid their parents and school teachers. It also had an exceptionally pretty central square, fringed with colourful houses and shops, where people from miles away would come to do their shopping. Today, it is better known for the more dubious accolade of being only 20 kilometres from Auschwitz, so close the two towns considered themselves to be sisters.

None of the Glahs siblings ever spoke about their childhoods, and if they mentioned Poland at all they’d spit with disgust and move on, no elaboration necessary. So without personal anecdotes to act as my starting point, I turned to historical documents. If my family had been one of the famous Jewish dynasties – the Rothschilds, say, or the Freuds, or even the Halberstams, a wealthy family who lived in the region at the time – this would have sufficed. But they were not, and it did not. There aren’t many records of the individual billions of poorer lives from Europe’s past, people who leave only footprints in the sand that blow away as soon as they are buried; people who leave, at most, unidentifiable black and white photos behind them, their faces blankly solemn for the photographer’s studio, the flash bleaching them of personality; or perhaps a brief mention in a census locked away in an obscure government vault that proves they once existed and nothing more. These people are merely referred to by history as ‘the poor’, ‘the peasants’, ‘the illiterate’, even though their lives are far more revealing of the times in which they lived than those of the grander families whose lives are faithfully recorded ever after by historians.

My father mentioned that back in the 1970s my great-uncle Alex claimed to have written a memoir, which was never published, but my father couldn’t remember if he’d even ever seen it, let alone read it. If it existed at all, it had surely long been thrown away, but it seemed more likely that this was another one of Alex’s many implausible boasts, that he once wrote a memoir that somehow no one had ever seen. The idea that Alex could ever have had the patience to sit down and write an entire book seemed about as likely as me hanging out with Picasso. But one day in 2014, my father’s younger brother, Rich, emailed from Florida: he had found Alex’s memoir among my grandmother’s possessions. A week later it arrived, a bulky FedEx package, the pages untouched for at least twenty years, since my grandmother died. It was typed in French on loose-leaf paper and Alex had almost certainly dictated it to an assistant who then typed it up, because it read just as Alex talked, in his gruff, colloquial, rat-a-tat stream of consciousness: ‘I still have my Yiddish accent. I’ve never tried to correct it. I love Yiddish. It is my mother tongue. The language I spoke when I knew hunger. When I fought those degenerate Poles who wished me dead,’ he wrote on the first page. It was like he was standing in front of me in his flat in Paris, shaking his finger wildly, jabbing it at invisible opponents. (The first time I saw Joe Pesci in a movie I nearly fell off my seat in shock because, if you swap the Italian heritage for a Jewish one, Pesci looks – and talks, and swaggers and gesticulates – a lot like my great-uncle Alex did.) My father, with characteristic heroism, translated all 250 pages of Alex’s memoir for me from French to English (my French is fine but in no way is it strong enough to handle Alex’s punchy slang with occasional swoops into Yiddish). But before he sent the translation back to me, he warned me to read it with at the very least a sceptical eye: Alex’s tendency towards self-mythology was infamous, and not even those closest to him ever really believed what he said about himself. So while this memoir was an astonishing find, I opened it expecting to read a somewhat deadening litany of Alex’s triumphs. Instead, I was amazed to discover that the first thirty or so pages were a detailed and humble account of his childhood in Chrzanow, a period of his life he certainly never discussed with any of us. Instead of focusing on himself and his glories, he wrote heartfelt descriptions of his family and their struggles, and lives that had been hidden in darkness for over a century burst into the light.

Jews had lived in Chrzanow since 1590, when the town’s first Jew, a man called Yaakov, settled there.[2] Yaakov clearly had quite an impact because by the beginning of the twentieth century more than 60 per cent of the town’s inhabitants were Jewish,[3] and one of its main industries was manufacturing Judaica, such as Torah scrolls and mezuzahs.[4] The town square was bordered by 120 specifically Jewish shops, their signs written in both Hebrew and Yiddish, while the open market within was where women shopped for kosher food and headscarves. When the Glahs children were born, Chrzanow even had a Jewish mayor, Dr Zygmunt Keppler, a lawyer. From its top office to its lowest social order, Chrzanow was a Jewish town.

This was the tail end of what was a brief and relatively golden age for Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anti-Semitism certainly existed there, most infamously in the Hilsner Affair, a series of trials that took place in 1899–1900, in which a Jew, Leopold Hilsner, was accused of blood libel and spent nineteen years in prison before finally being pardoned. But Emperor Franz Joseph I had a fondness for the Jewish religion, and under his rule, Austro-Hungarian Jews emerged from the ghettos and became part of society as the emperor gave Jews equal rights, and financed Jewish institutions. This is why there seems to have been such a flourishing of Jewish productivity in the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1848 and 1916, from such people as Theodor Herzl, Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud: it’s not that this generation of Jews was uniquely talented compared with previous ones, it’s that they were granted a then unique amount of freedom.

The Chrzanovian Jews were mostly poor, but their lives were better than they had ever been or would be again. They had a friendly relationship with the Catholic Poles in the neighbouring countryside, who came into town to go to church, do their shopping and take their children to school, where they were taught alongside the Jewish children.[5] Chrzanow was situated close to the Three Emperors’ Corner, the border dividing Russia, Germany and Austria, and the city lay on the main highway that connected eastern and western Europe, meaning traders from all over came through it. So although it was a very Jewish town it was also a very international one, and the townspeople regularly mixed with many other ethnicities and nationalities. Back then, this was a wonderful financial advantage for the town’s Jews; very soon, it would become one of their greatest misfortunes.

One person who never trusted her neighbours was Chaya Rotter. Born in 1873 and the youngest of three children, she grew up in Chrzanow. Despite her lifelong closeness to multiple other countries, she spoke only Yiddish and Polish. She had little interest in mixing with anyone but her own kind.

On 13 March 1898, when she was twenty-five, she married someone who was, ostensibly, her kind in a wedding arranged by her parents. Reuben Glahs was a Jewish scholar five years younger than her and also from Chrzanow. But in truth, they were a deeply unlikely couple, in looks as much as temperament. In the very few photos that remain of her it is clear she was a large woman, solid rather than fat, with much-remarked-upon large feet and a face not even a poet could describe as beautiful. But her most extraordinary feature was her eyes. On her medical notes later in life they were described simply as ‘blue/grey’, a description that suggests either enormous self-restraint or irony on the doctor’s part. In fact, they went in two different directions at the same time, which made her look both wild and watchful.

Reuben, by contrast, was dark-haired, delicate, shorter than Chaya and strikingly handsome, like a young Adrien Brody. Unlike Chaya, he was fluent in multiple languages – German, Polish, Russian, Yiddish – and the only person in Chrzanow other than a rabbi who could read and write Hebrew. Where Chaya was tough, practical and energetic, Reuben was gentle, scholarly and slow. In his memoir, Sender – Alex as I knew him – draws frequent comparisons between his parents (invariably to his mother’s disadvantage, no matter how neutral the differences he was describing): she liked to debate furiously in the market square, washing the family’s dishes around the central well where the townswomen gathered, while he preferred to sit with his friends in the cafés, listening and nodding and drinking coffee. She was ambitious for more whereas Reuben thought you should be happy with what you have. Between them, they represented the different attitudes peasant Jews had about their place in the world at that time: should you fight for a better life than the one you were born into, or should you meekly sit back and be grateful for what you were given? Chaya and Reuben never really resolved this difference, and their marriage was less than blissful.

‘She believed herself, quite falsely, to be from a higher social class than his. So she treated my father with indifference. I saw her coolness to him. It pained me, for my father was a man of deep goodness, of noble heart and intelligence,’ Sender wrote in his memoir, in one of many passages setting out at length his mother’s flaws and his father’s perfection.

As the daughter of a poor tailor, it’s unlikely Chaya really thought of herself as being in a higher social class than anyone else, and Sender’s allegation almost certainly says more about his feelings for his mother than it does about Chaya’s feelings for Reuben. (And these feelings were also somewhat ironic, given that, in temperament and ambition, Sender was much more like his mother than his father.) But it is also likely that Reuben was a disappointment to her. When they met, he was a handsome man celebrated in the town for his intellect, but Chaya soon learned you can’t eat intellect. He worked diligently from the day of his wedding, but life only got harder for them, because of his unfailing inability to earn any money. He tried his hand at being a tailor, a glass blower, a potato picker, a translator and, finally, a Singer sewing machine travelling salesman, and each career was less successful than the last. They were desperately poor, and became more so with each child born. After an initial stillbirth in 1900, Jehuda, Chaya’s favourite, was born in 1901, followed shortly by Jakob in 1902, then Sender in 1906, one more stillbirth, then a little girl, Mindel, in 1908, who died from illness as a child, and finally Sala in 1910. For a decade, Chaya was almost continually pregnant, and hungry.

The children’s early years were both difficult and blissful. They were in a constant state of near starvation, dreaming of food that wasn’t even available to buy, not that they could have afforded it anyway. One day, a piece of cheese appeared in the window of one of the shops in the town square, beneath a glass bell. The town’s children, including Jakob and Sender, stared at it in wonder: cheese! With holes! Several centimetres thick! No one had ever seen such a marvel, and they watched, longingly, as one of the wealthy Chrzanovians from the town’s poshest street, Aleja Henryka (Boulevard Henry), went into the shop, bought it, bagged it and walked home with it, without giving any of them even a crumb. But Sender got his own back on his rich neighbours: whenever he smelled good cooking in one of their houses, he would sneak around the back, look through the kitchen window, wait for the cook to step away, then climb in, pocket a meatball and run into the forest to eat his prize. His mother, secretly pleased at her youngest son’s pragmatic approach to life, pretended not to notice the grease stains on his trousers.

They lived on a street called Kostalista in a ruin of a building, in a two-room apartment on the second floor, so dark you could barely see more than 3 feet in front of you in the daytime (Chrzanow didn’t get electricity until 1912). The windows looked out onto a barren courtyard filled with firewood for the long, bitter winters. The apartment was cold, dirty and dangerous, and the children, particularly Sender, occasionally fell out of the unprotected windows, crashing down head first onto the paving stones outside.

Despite all the hunger and near-death tumbles, life for the children was happy. Little Sala, sickly from birth with weak lungs, would stay at home with her mother during the day, contentedly cooking and sewing. Sometimes when she was allowed out, she would play with her pretty cousin, Rose Ornstein, who was about the same age as her, and the two would make dolls out of clothes-pins. The boys nominally went to the local grammar school with non-Jews in the morning and then Hebrew school in the afternoon, but only Jehuda actually attended classes. He especially liked his Catholic Polish teacher, who taught him in the morning, and the teacher liked him, even coming over to the Glahses’ home for a kosher dinner from time to time. But Jakob and especially Sender preferred to run through the streets and play football with their Ornstein cousins, Rose’s brothers, who were roughly the same ages as they were: Maurice, the eldest and therefore the leader; Josek, who was two years younger than Sender but so brave when it came to stealing food that Sender graciously considered him an equal; quiet and shy Arnold; and Alex Ornstein, the baby of the boys. (As well as Rose, there were two other Ornstein girls, Anna and Sarah.) The Ornsteins were the children of Chaya’s older sister, Hadassah, who managed to produce seven children in a decade,[6] all sweet-natured and easy-going, despite having to fight for a spot round the dining table at every meal. They lived around the corner from the Glahs family, on Aleja Henryka, named after a converted Jew,[7] because their father, Hirsch, was comparatively wealthy. But Sender never mentions feeling socially inferior to, or jealous of, his cousins in his memoir. Instead, he describes the thrill of dashing up Aleja Henryka with his brother and cousins, Sender and Josek, pocketing some meatballs on the way and heading into the birch tree woods, where there was a large sand pit, a stone quarry and a lake. They would eat Sender and Josek’s takings and hide from their parents for hours, playing make-believe and kicking a football that was a rolled-up bunch of rags.

The Glahs family kept kosher and Reuben, like all the Jewish men in Chrzanow, went to prayers every Shabbat and on holy days, walking to the Great Synagogue off the market square around the corner from their home. They were Orthodox but not ultra-Orthodox, unlike many of their fellow townspeople who dominated the local politics, in their heavy black clothes, long beards and side curls. In the very few surviving photos of the Glahs children from this period, which I found in Sala’s and Henri’s albums, the boys often wear yarmulkes, but they don’t have side curls or wear traditional clothes, and Sala is generally wearing pretty frilly dresses, while Chaya never covered her hair, as ultra-Orthodox women do. Their lives were informed by Judaism, but not controlled by it, and compared with many of their neighbours they were almost scandalously modern.

Throughout Galicia at this time there was a growing schism among the Jews regarding tradition versus progress, with the heavy-coated conservatives on one side, and the less tradition-bound Jews on the other. The latter argued for a modern approach to Judaism, influenced by the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, which emerged in the late eighteenth century and argued that Jews should maintain their secular distinctiveness, but should also take more part in the modern world, such as adopting modern dress and broader education. It looked at Judaism as an evolving cultural identity rather than a restrictive religious one. Ironically, this ideology that pushed for integration would later contribute to the rise of Zionism, partly because many Jews later realised that, no matter how much they assimilated, they were still persecuted, and therefore Jews needed a Jewish homeland.

But in Austria-Hungary in the early twentieth century, the idea of a Jewish state was so far away it might have been on the moon. Given that traditional Jews far outnumbered progressive ones in Galicia in general and Chrzanow in particular, the whole debate was ostensibly moot for Chrzanovian Jews. But Jehuda, a talented scholar from an early age who would likely have read about the Haskalah, argued for his family to adopt a more progressive approach to Judaism. In his memoir, Sender describes, with palpable retrospective awe of his big brother, how at the young age of twelve Jehuda urged his parents to be less obviously Jewish and to assimilate more with the Germans or Poles – to try to speak their language more instead of always relying on Yiddish, for example. Chaya waved her son away and continued to speak Yiddish loudly in the town square. Reuben similarly couldn’t countenance giving up what he saw as his primary identity. But as a compromise, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Jehuda to change the spelling of their surname from Glahs to the more westernised Glass – something simultaneously strong and fragile, able to withstand pressure but prone to breaking. Jews’ names as a whole in this period were unfixed, mutable – a sign it seemed to them at the time of their adaptability. But it was also an indication of the instability of their lives, and was seen as part of their ‘rootlessness’ that would soon be used against them.

All four children idolised their gentle, loving father, who raised his hand only once: to Sender (of course), when he announced at age four, on the way to synagogue, that he didn’t believe in God, and the strike was so half-hearted it felt more like a pat. Although Chaya was undoubtedly the more assertive parent, it was Reuben’s looks that were dominant. Jehuda, Jakob and Sala all inherited Reuben’s delicate, pretty appearance; Jakob in particular, who Reuben named after his beloved late father,[8] looked so similar to him the neighbours used to joke they probably had the same fingerprints. He was also the most like his father: gentle, passive and easily pushed around – Jakob skipped school only because Sender told him to do so. Jehuda, quiet and self-contained, inherited his father’s intellectual curiosity, but he was more reliable and practical. As for baby Sala, her father loved to buy pretty dresses for his little daughter, while Chaya, judging from photos, would not have recognised a pretty dress from an ugly one if it hit her in the face in the market place. But Reuben always took care over his appearance, even when he was reduced to wearing almost literal rags. The Glahs children all inherited his appreciation of aesthetics, and for the rest of their lives they dressed carefully and stylishly, a lifelong show of love for their father.

The only child who resembled, and acted, like Chaya was Sender. According to family lore Sender was ‘born fighting’, because when he came out of his mother he was silent, so the midwife slapped him. It was the last time in his life Sender lost a fight. From the age of six he was getting into scraps at school, daily. He wasn’t bothered by the blood and bruises as long as he won the battle, and he always fought until he won. Sender was born on 25 December and his mother referred to him as ‘little Jesus’, a teasing reference to his dominating personality, which was in inverse proportion to his physical size. Unlike his brothers, Sender was short, something he later put down to ‘deprivation’, although he never explained why his brothers both grew to over 6 feet, about a foot taller than him. But Sender wasn’t just a stubby little fighter – he was also a dreamer, and what he dreamed of was escape. He loved to hear his father describe places he’d read about, such as Paris, London, Venice, cities of such beauty they made the Chrzanow synagogues look like nothing, Reuben said. Sender loved his father, but he would never be like him, slaving away for no recognition. What was the point of working hard without reward? At the age of eight, Paris was far beyond his reach, so he came up with a plan to go to the closer and yet almost equally exotic Trzebina, a town 7 kilometres away, where people from Chrzanow went when they needed a dentist. Sender told his mother he had a terrible toothache and Chaya let him take the train on his own with his favourite cousin, Josek Ornstein. The town itself was something of a disappointment, but the freedom of travel thrilled Sender so much he was, for once, almost speechless. Even though it meant the boys had to suffer a hideously painful tooth extraction by the dentist, the journey was worth it. So much so, they did it again, costing them another tooth. Still worth it.

‘It was a world of superstitions, of quarrelling rabbis, quarrelling Hasidim, where thousands of Jews lived, twenty synagogues, where the air was so fresh. I sometimes felt, in lieu of food, I was nourished by the Carpathian air,’ Alex later wrote. But then the First World War started and everything that had been good about the children’s lives instantly turned very, very bad.

WHEN CHAYA WAVED her husband off to war she must have had few hopes of ever seeing him again. Reuben couldn’t even walk up Aleja Henryka without losing his breath, and that one time he gave Sender a smack he, rather than Sender, had cried – how on earth was such a man going to survive life in the Austro-Hungarian Army? But like many Jewish men, Reuben felt intense loyalty to the Emperor Franz Joseph I because of his kindness to the Jews. An educated man like Reuben would have been all too aware that it was very much in his best interest, as a Jew, to defend the emperor. So he signed up to fight pretty much as soon as his country declared war on Serbia. But there were, surely, few more unlikely soldiers than Reuben Glass.

Chaya was now, essentially, a single mother at the age of forty-one, with four children, aged thirteen, twelve, eight and four. There was no way she could look after them on her own. Her older sister, Hadassah, was busy enough with her own seven children and her brother, Samuel, was busy with his four. No, she needed a man to take charge of the household, one who would look after the family and look after her. She didn’t have to search too far to find just the one she needed.

Jehuda was only thirteen, but when his father went off to war he became the head of the household. Chaya relied on him, not even like a wife on a husband but a daughter on a father, and this was to be their dynamic for the rest of their lives. It was an obligation Jehuda quietly shouldered with enormous patience. ‘Jehuda,’ Chaya would say proudly to her children and, later, her grandchildren, ‘iz die beste.’ (Sender, on the other hand, she would describe as alternately a ‘Pshakrev’ – dog’s blood, or a Polish curse – or ‘mitzvah’, a blessing, depending on both of their moods.) Despite still being at school, Jehuda, as he later recounted in his own notes, supported the family, working for the library in the evenings and at weekends, and he tried, with minimal success, to get his brothers to go to school. He, too, started missing school: his 1916/17 school report says he missed 145 hours that year, but he still got straight As. However, as Chaya became more demanding, and life in Chrzanow became more difficult, what he really wanted was to leave. Whereas Sender looked to schemes and tooth extractions as his means of escape, Jehuda realised academia might be his ticket.