AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Bill, working as an auxiliary policeman during the war, with Ronald.
When he heard that some anti-Semites were causing trouble in town and even bothering his son, he didn’t hesitate. During the war, he was too old to fight so he worked as an auxiliary (or volunteer) policeman, providing support to the depleted police force, and he had kept his badge and truncheon. Bill picked up his truncheon, marched straight out the door and, as he put it, beat the hell out of them. Bill returned home, satisfied with this outcome, but Sala knew she had to get her boys out of Farmingdale.
In 1952, while Bill was at work and her boys were at school, Sala got into her car and drove to Manhasset, a small Long Island town only 18 miles away on the map but another world away socially. There, she met a broker and the two of them spent the day looking at houses. Sala soon found one she liked, on a broad, tree-lined street called Old Mill Road, and she took out nearly all of her and Bill’s savings and paid a non-reimbursable deposit on the house. That night, back in Farmingdale, she told Bill what she had done and he hit the roof, raging at how she had spent all their money on a house they didn’t need. The next morning they all went to look at the house Sala had blown the family’s savings on. It was big, three storeys and almost three times as big as their bungalow in Farmingdale. There was a garage, a pretty front garden and a bay window in the sitting room. Just down the road, walking distance from the house, was a shopping centre, with designer stores lined along a promenade where people sat at outdoor tables and drank coffee. There was no John Birch Society here, no pokey little school staffed with underqualified teachers, no gangs of racist bullies in the street – and no extended Freiman family. All his life, Bill had wanted to break away from his family and move up in the world. At last, fifteen years into their marriage, Sala had helped him to do just that. He was ecstatic about the new house and the family moved in almost immediately. For the rest of his life, he proudly bragged to everyone who would listen about the time his pretty French wife went out one day and bought a fancy house.
The same year the family moved to Manhasset, Bill – at his thirteen-year-old son’s urging – legally changed their name from Freiman to Freeman. It was an uncanny echo of the then twelve-year-old Jehuda Glahs convincing Reuben to westernise their name to Glass, forty years earlier, thousands of miles away. Jehuda/Henri and Ron were so similar they were always more like father and son than uncle and nephew, and they both would always regard their Jewishness as an encumbrance, a hurdle thrust upon them on the path to a smooth and successful life. Bill’s extended family was horrified and kept Freiman, but Bill had no sentimentality about his surname, which had frequently been bastardised by census takers anyway, and he was happy to be seen as a typical American rather than an urchin from the Lower East Side who grew up speaking Yiddish. It was the definitive break from the past he had always longed for, and my family’s assimilation, which began almost half a century earlier in Chrzanow, was now complete.
WHILE IN MANY ways privileged (in Henri’s case, very privileged), the oldest and youngest of the Glass siblings led ordinary post-war lives. They raised their families, they bought property, they strove to improve their lot. They worked to make sure that their children had better lives than they’d had, and they succeeded in that, too. Theirs are stories of successful Jewish aspiration. They are also stories of assimilation: they held on to their Jewishness as a personal and private identity while sloughing off many of the outward shows of the religion. In his work for the French government and in her efforts to raise educated, highly ambitious American children, they also played their parts in shaping post-war France and America respectively, which is another key part of the twentieth-century Jewish story. Jews hadn’t just survived the war, they would go on to play enormous roles in the countries in which they lived.[3] There were obvious variations between their lives: Henri was very happily married, Sala was less so; Henri and Sonia went from being working class to upper class; Sala and Bill moved more incrementally from working class to lower middle class; Sala and Bill’s sons went to college, Henri and Sonia’s daughter did not. But in the brushstrokes, their stories are very typical of mid-twentieth-century western Jewish lives. Successful, quiet and largely anonymous lives.
Alex, by contrast, led an extraordinary life.
12
ALEX – Social Mobility
Paris, 1940s–1970s
IN APRIL 1961, Alex returned to Cannes, but whereas last time he went to the city in order to save his life, this time he went to change it forever. Almost vibrating with excitement, Alex walked up the driveway of the Villa La Californie and rang the doorbell, ready to meet his idol. He was shown into the house, which looked out over the Cannes bay where he had worked and lived with Seytour during the war. He then walked into the sitting room, where Pablo Picasso was waiting for him.
Only two decades earlier Alex had been arrested on that bay and sent to a concentration camp; now he was having an idyllic day with the greatest artist of the twentieth century. And this was possibly the real reason Alex stayed in France, despite his fury with it: only by living alongside ghosts from the past could the triumphs of the present taste even sweeter.
‘I wasn’t simply happy. I was at the summit of happiness. It was the most beautiful, the greatest day of my life,’ Alex later remembered. The little boy wh
o once had to steal meatballs was now friends with some of the most revered creative minds of the twentieth century, first Dior and now Picasso. Sender had brawled his way out of what was ostensibly a ghetto and was now among the gods.
Jewish social mobility has long been the subject of plays, racist jibes and even hip-hop lyrics: ‘You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This is how they did it,’ Jay-Z rapped in his 2017 song ‘The Story of OJ’, in which he offers the timeless advice to his fans that they should buy property instead of drugs and lap dances. (And to think, some people argue that hip-hop has lost its connection to its young urban origins.) Donald Trump reportedly once expressed shock on seeing a black accountant: ‘Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys who wear yarmulkes every day … Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.’[1] Whereas an ability to count money, by implication, is a natural skill for Jews. If only Shylock had been available to do the accounting for Trump’s casinos.
These stereotypes – in all their grosser permutations – have existed for centuries. And yet it is also the case that Jews in the West have experienced more social mobility than pretty much any other minority group in the late twentieth century. In his study on Jewish social mobility,[2] Paul Burstein makes this memorable point of comparison: in the 1940s, Jewish representation in Who’s Who was lower than the overall American and the British average; by the 1990s, Jews were represented proportionally over 4.5 times more than the American average and almost six times that of the British.
In America, Jews make up less than 2 per cent of the national population yet account for one-third of American Nobel laureates. Similarly, two out of every three European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, yet those who survived, and assimilated, were more likely to enjoy social mobility than any other minority. In Britain by the mid-1980s, for example, despite making up only 0.5 per cent of the population, Jews accounted for 5 per cent of the country’s doctors and 9 per cent of its lawyers.[3] ‘By the opening of the 21st century, it was no longer possible to find any significant area of British life from which Jews were excluded,’ Howard M. Sachar writes in A History of the Jews in the Modern World. And given how few Jews there actually are in the United States and Europe, it is remarkable how well represented they are in public, intellectual and cultural life.
Yet there are few satisfying explanations as to why this is the case. As Burstein puts it, undoubtedly correctly, the reason there are hardly any good studies about Jewish social mobility is that Jews have resisted drawing attention to this trend, let alone explaining it, out of fear of provoking anti-Semitism. There are, after all, plenty of historic examples of Jewish success being used as an excuse for the targeting of Jews, and the Glass family experienced multiple incidents of that in their lifetimes. In the absence of proper analysis, the most popular theories range from the unhelpfully vague (they work hard, they care about education – as if other minority groups don’t?), to relying on repulsive eugenics ideas and conspiracy theories.
The rise of anti-Semitism on the Right[4] and Left[5] in the twenty-first century has reignited gross comments about Jewish prominence and alleged power. But it would be bizarre, and maybe even flat-out detrimental, to ignore this part of the modern Jewish story when talking about Jews in the twentieth century, because pretending this truth doesn’t exist merely leaves it free to be exploited by bigots and conspiracists. So when I started writing this book I knew I wanted to look at Jewish social mobility in the last century, and it didn’t take me long to realise that the person in my family who best embodies this storyline, as well as the probable reasons behind it, was Alex.
The path that brought Alex to Picasso began when he returned to the fashion business after the war. Some might think that the gravity of what he’d endured during the war would have made fashion seem intolerably superficial and ridiculous in comparison. But this would be a misunderstanding of what fashion means, and has always meant, to France.
Today Paris comes at the end of the fashion week cycle – the order always running: New York, London, Milan, Paris – and, sure, there is usually some kind of acknowledgement in those other cities that fashion week was happening. A minor politician might sit in the front row at some of the shows. The local mayor will make a speech welcoming the fashion journalists, dutifully trotting out statistics about how important – meaning lucrative – fashion is to the city. But these nods invariably feel merely dutiful – half-hearted and token. You can all but hear the faint grinding of teeth as these politicians demean themselves to consort with the lowbrow world of fashion.
Fashion weeks aren’t important to those cities. They are accessories rather than the main outfit, something that could easily be removed without anyone noticing the lack.
Paris is different. There, it feels like the whole city is invested in fashion week, as much as if a major football tournament or film festival was happening in the centre of town. Taxi drivers know where the main shows happen and waiters in cafés talk knowledgeably about whether the new designers at the big brands are living up to their hype. In Paris, fashion isn’t just an add-on, it is an integral part of the city’s identity; it has always been thus, and never more so than in the aftermath of the war, when Alex was reentering the industry.
In the run-up to the war, and during it, while women in Britain and America were being told to make do and mend, French women were instructed it was their patriotic duty to look fashionable: ‘Fashion will remain Parisienne in its most intimate fibre. You will dress yourself simply but elegantly. Those who are at the front want you to be pretty,’ read a fashion editorial in 1939.[6]
Even the Nazis understood the importance of fashion to Paris’s identity. Early in the war, Hitler set out to make Berlin the fashion capital instead of Paris, so in July 1940 Nazis marched into the offices of Lucien Lelong, a designer and then president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and demanded he hand over all the records of the French fashion business. Lelong understood this was an attempt to hijack not just the French fashion industry but France’s culture and pride, so in November of that year he travelled to Berlin to insist that haute couture must stay in Paris. He argued that the designers and workers wouldn’t be able to produce anything if they were torn from their homes and families in France and forcibly repatriated to Germany. Surprisingly, the Nazis agreed and Lelong saved not just French fashion, but also thousands of lives, as many of the seamstresses who worked in haute couture – as well as the occasional designer like Alex – were Jewish refugees.
After Paris was liberated, some of the British and American forces were outraged at the fashionability of the Frenchwomen they saw. But as historian Anne Sebba writes, staying fashionable was seen in France as a form of resistance: ‘To look dowdy was a negation of patriotic duty, when by sporting extravagant costumes they could thumb their noses at the Germans. Fashion was, for the French, even after four years of occupation, anything but trivial.’[7]
Fashion was considered so untrivial that the resumption of the fashion industry was seen by the French as analogous to France reemerging from the ashes of wartime humiliation. So in 1945 Lelong, along with Nina Ricci’s son, Robert, came up with the Petit Théâtre de la Mode, an exhibition in which French designers dressed small dolls in their latest fashions. Despite the country being pretty much broke, the French Ministry of Reconstruction supported the show, because this was an important statement about the resurgence of French industry. The dolls were placed in sets designed by French artists, including Jean Cocteau, and the designers who took part included Balenciaga, Hermès, Lanvin, Grès, Schiaparelli, Rochas, and a designer described as ‘Alex’.
This was almost certainly Alex Maguy. ‘Alex’s’ doll, which is currently in the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington, is wearing a loose black-and-white-checked coat with a green lining, which is very similar to Alex’s designs before and after the war. More tellingly, Alex definitely contributed a design to a similar initiative four years later called the Merci Train, also organised by Lelong, and nearly all the designers involved in the Petit Théâtre de la Mode also took part in the Merci Train. On top of that, he would certainly have known Lelong (through Dior, who worked for him) and Robert Ricci (through his mother, Nina) beforehand. ‘We can be almost completely sure he was also part of the Petit Théâtre,’ academic Ludivine Broch, who has written on the Merci Train extensively, told me.
But why would he omit his surname? Broch pointed out to me that several designers who took part in the Petit Théâtre ‘were going for the one-name brand’, probably to make themselves sound a little more ritzy, more like Hermès or Chanel. But because ‘Maguy’ sounded so similar to the then popular Parisian designer Maggy Rouff – and it also wasn’t actually his name – he opted to use ‘Alex’ instead. But it may also be because of a message that was being subtly pushed by the Petit Théâtre, and France itself, in the immediate post-war era. There was no reference to the Resistance in the Petit Théâtre, and it’s notable that various designers who had openly worked for the Nazis, such as Rochas and Maggy Rouff,[8] were involved with it. The Petit Théâtre was staged in the middle of the épuration légale, in which France hurriedly condemned collaborators in an attempt to banish memories of the occupation to the past. So while there was certainly appetite in the country then to punish traitors, there was also a growing desire for the country to move on from this national shame. It was this mood that would ultimately lead to Perré’s quiet readmittance into society. So it may very well be that Lelong felt that Alex’s full name was too closely associated with his Resistance activities, or just his Jewishness, and this would serve as an undesired distraction – hence ‘Alex’. In normal circumstances Alex would never have gone along with this, but he was absolutely frantic after the war to restart his fashion business, so it is entirely possible he would have agreed, for this one-off, to drop his surname. Alex was an extremely proud man, but if there was one quality he had in more abundance than pride, it was pragmatism.
The Petit Théâtre was hugely popular from the day it opened at the Louvre in 1945, ultimately attracting more than 100,000 visitors and raising more than 1 million francs for the war effort.[9] It was so successful it then went on a world tour, travelling to Stockholm, Vienna, Leeds, New York and San Francisco, sending a reminder of
France’s superior couture culture to the world. After years of occupation and submission, France was defiantly reasserting its national pride.
