Book review: House of Glass by Hadley Freeman

Hadley Freeman didn’t attend the funeral of her paternal grandmother, Sala — who died when she was 16 — in spite of loving her. She had avoided her grandmother when she was alive, recoiling from her neediness, and her dying didn’t immediately change how Freeman felt. In this beautifully written memoir, she has now uncovered what lay beneath her grandmother’s oppressive affection.

Sala Glass had been born in the Polish town of Chrzanow, 12 miles from Auschwitz. One night in 1918, Polish men and women rioted through the town, ransacking synagogues, smashing Jewish shop windows and attacking the Jewish population. Freeman’s great-uncle Alex (who was 12 at the time) ran out to join the Jews fighting back but to his horror, he recognised his brother’s former tutor as a leader in the assault, alongside others whom the family thought of as friends. He later said: “Something in me died in the face of this inhuman explosion of savagery. From that day, my childhood was over.”

The pogroms continued and Sala moved with her mother and three brothers to Paris. Unfortunately, once there, Sala suffered with pleurisy so had to be sent to sanatoriums to recover. She enjoyed a brief happy period after she regained her health, working as a patternmaker in Paris and becoming engaged to a dental student. 

But in 1937, she was persuaded by her brother Alex that because Jews were no longer safe in Europe, she should go to the United States to marry an acquaintance of his called Bill Freeman. She was convinced by her brother that if she made it safely to the United States, she would be able to send for the rest of the family and thus save them.

This was not the case and Freeman observes that Sala engaged in a peculiarly feminine kind of self-erasure. Her brothers “performed the traditionally masculine roles of carrying out acts of extraordinary bravery” but the only kind of heroism available to Sala was a negation of herself and her own desires, forcing her to leave behind the city, career and man she loved.

And there was worse to come. No story about the fate of a Jewish family in Thirties Europe can be read without a sharp sense of peril and the reader’s fears over which of Sala’s siblings will survive the Holocaust is part of what makes House of Glass so breathtakingly compelling.

It would undermine the great care with which Freeman tells this story to reveal the fates of Sala’s brothers here, but suffice to say that Sala’s favourite cousin, Rose Ornstein, was killed at Auschwitz. When Rose watched the Vichy police patrol the bus she was on, she scribbled on a postcard “They are coming for me. I love you. Goodbye.” and handed it to her neighbour. 

Freeman writes that when Sala finally received that postcard after the war “years after Rose sent it, she screamed and collapsed in her hallway, watched by her toddler son Ronald, my father.”

Freeman has said it took her 18 years to research this book and it is an enormous undertaking, freighted with trauma. It is written in a different register from her whip-smart journalism and indeed her previous books. She is loving but sceptical towards her family, managing to break down the self-mythologising of her great-uncle Alex while also exploring the dangers inherent in the stereotype of Jewish passivity.

While at times heart-breaking, this is nonetheless not a bleak book. As her great-uncle Alex wrote, “life is worth the trouble of fighting death”, and Freeman’s spirited memoir is a powerful endorsement of this view.

House of Glass by Hadley Freeman (Fourth Estate, £16.99), buy it here.