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y learned it from how hastily their mothers turned off the TV when Holocaust documentaries came on, how sharply their fathers said, ‘Why do you ask these questions?’ Many Holocaust survivors celebrated their survival by clutching their Jewish identity even closer, but the Glasses were different. Henri, Sonia and Sala assimilated, and so did their children, because that is what their parents encouraged them to do. Even Alex, who left many of his paintings to Israel and proudly kept his Yiddish accent, was hardly religious. The only time I ever saw him in a synagogue was at my bat mitzvah. Within their lifetimes, they threw off the ties of Orthodoxy and raised children who couldn’t even read Hebrew. This was as much to do with pragmatism as it was to do with trauma: they wanted their children to be safe, and they knew from their own experiences that meant not being overtly Jewish. The past to them was ugly and painful – they were too close to it to see that it was also triumphant – and therefore to be pushed to the back of the closet, like a shoebox of yellowing photos. But what binds a family together if not the past? Blood is not thick enough, especially if the extended family is scattered on entirely different continents. Shared history is the stuff that sticks.
As the Glasses themselves knew, suppressing the past does not mean you don’t think about it. This is the weird irony about Jewish assimilation, and also the joke about it: all these Jews living totally western lives, eating ham and doing Christmas, yet always talking about the Holocaust. Well, it’s a lot harder to dismiss history than religious doctrine, because one is real and one is not. I cannot remember a time when I was not aware that the only reason I am alive is that my grandmother had to give up everything to escape the Nazis, and I felt in some vague way crushed by it. There is a neat divide in my family between those who are quietly haunted by the stories in this book (my father Ronald, Danièle’s daughter Natasha, me) and those who are less so (my uncle Rich, Danièle’s son Alexandre, my sister Nell). Yet we all reacted to our family’s past the same way, which was to let the family drift apart. This was never the intention of the Glasses, who loved each other, but we took our cues from them: if reminders of the past should be pushed away, didn’t that include our own family?
But as perhaps Jews know better than most, you can never entirely escape your past.
In the late 1990s, my parents became friends with a Jewish American woman who lived in Paris, named Flora Lewis, then in her seventies. Flora was an extremely impressive woman, a long-time foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and the first woman to be given her own column by that paper. But early triumphs are no protection against the cruelties of old age and when my parents met Flora she was facing eviction from her beloved flat in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, because her building had been bought and she could not afford to buy her apartment from the new owner. So my father offered to buy it and Flora would stay on as his tenant. This arrangement lasted until Flora’s death in 2002, at which point my family moved in.
It wasn’t until we walked in that we realised that the flat backs onto the École des Beaux-Arts, the school where my grandmother studied textile design before she went to America.
Shortly before we took possession of the apartment, I got my first job. I’d known since I was a teenager that I wanted to be a journalist, but while I was at university a strange and more specific idea took hold.
‘I think it would be fun to write about fashion,’ I said to my mother one morning when I was about twenty, as I read a style article in the Guardian.
‘Mmm really, sweetie?’ she replied uncertainly. But if my mother was surprised by my sudden interest in fashion then I was even more so. Up until then, the only appeal clothes had for me was how much I could hide my body within them, and my wardrobe largely consisted of long black skirts and shapeless long-sleeved tops, all bought from Camden and Kensington Markets. But as I slowly began to slough off the anorexia that had dominated my teenage years and blanketed my entire worldview, I realised there was some kernel in me, that I could neither explain nor even entirely understand, that was genuinely interested in fashion. Like Sala, like Alex, I too wanted to see beauty.
After university, I got a job on the Guardian’s fashion desk and helped to cover the shows in Paris, always staying in our family apartment. Every time I walked out of the apartment to go to a fashion show, I was walking in my grandmother’s footsteps, going to the same shows – Dior, Rochas, Lanvin – that she loved to read about in the magazines Henri and Alex sent to her in America from Paris.
Then one day, at the Dior show in the Tuileries, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘Aren’t you my cousin?’
It was Alexandre de Betak, now known as Alex, and he was working as a fashion show producer. He had seen my name on the list of invited press, which is how he recognised me. He gave me a hug, but I felt a little shy, self-conscious about all the big-name fashion editors watching us, wondering why the cool show producer was talking to this lowly fashion writer. He didn’t seem to notice, and he took down my phone number. I watched him run around the show, making sure all the editors were happy in their seats, the lighting was right, the flowers were perfect, the sound levels were correct, the models were ready to walk on. It was like stepping into the anecdotes my father used to tell about watching Alex Maguy getting his fashion shows ready. Today Alex de Betak is one of the biggest independent show producers in the world, with clients that include Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, Nike and H&M. But probably his closest and most loyal client is Dior, just as Alex Maguy’s closest friend in the fashion world was Christian Dior. Neither Alex de Betak nor the Dior company knew of that connection until I started researching this book.
Not long after meeting Alex, I got an email at work: ‘I know we haven’t met but I think we’re cousins. Could we meet?’
It was from someone called Philippe Ornstein, the son of Armand, the former little boy hidden in the woods who had grown up to help found Daniel Hechter. Philippe was then working in London at the fashion company Mulberry and he had seen my name on a list of fashion writers, which prompted him to get in touch. As soon as we met it felt like he had always been a part of my life. For hours we sat in a random bar in Soho and there was no time for awkward pauses because we were too busy talking and laughing; it was like the best first date of my life, but it was even better because I already knew he would be in my life for ever, because he was family.
The third generation found one another through fashion, or the schmatte trade as our grandparents would have called it when they were working for next to nothing as furriers, leather tanners, textile designers and dressmakers in the Marais. Alex de Betak was introduced to fashion by Alex Maguy, just as Philippe was by his father and I was by my grandmother. We are living proof that the past holds on to you in ways that go beyond science, and although the Glass siblings had long since died by the time their grandchildren met, we instinctively carried on their traditions.
The more frequently I came to Paris for the shows, the closer I became to my French family and the more of them I met. As we came together, we shared what little we knew of the past and I could see all of us getting a keener interest in it, and a sharper awareness of our roots, especially as I started to know more of my Ornstein cousins, descendants of those who had escaped to Israel. Alex de Betak and I see one another especially often and we still say how much Sala would have loved to have come to the shows with us, just as she once did with Alex Maguy.
Sala had dreamed of moving back to Paris, of being with her family, having lunches with them in cafés, revelling in the glamour of the French fashion world, walking among the boutiques in Saint-Germain. She never got to do that – but I do. Because she gave up everything, I get to live her dream. I think of her every time I walk out of my parents’ flat and down the rue Bonaparte in Saint-Germain, past the gates of her old school, to the café to have my breakfast before going to a fashion show. And I think of all of them every time my train from London pulls into the Gare du Nord, how they arrived in Paris by train almost a hundred years ago, knowing almost no one and owning less. How far they went in their lives, how politics and fate and familial dynamics tore them apart, and how we came back together in the end.
Just outside Jerusalem there is a tree for Jacques. Alex and Henri planted it in his memory around the time their mother moved there. They planted it because they remembered how much he loved to hide in the woods as a boy, and how for him – and all of them – trees were a source of comfort, giving them a place to hide as children from the poverty and the pogroms. Closer to my home, and his, Jacques’s name is inscribed on the wall of names outside the Shoah Memorial in Paris: ‘Jacob Glass’, it reads, changing the name of the boy born Jakob Glahs, who became the man called Jacques Glass, one final time. He is listed there alongside the 76,000 other Jews, including 11,000 children who were deported from France. ‘Take the time to look at a beautiful painting. Don’t be afraid, just enter the painting, let it embrace you, like music. Life is worth the trouble of fighting death,’ are the last lines of Alex’s memoir, and I try always to take the time to look at Jacques’s wall. It is in the Marais, just a few minutes’ walk from where Jacques lived with Alex, and where Chaya lived with Sala, steps away from where Jacques boarded a minibus and was shipped off to Pithiviers. It’s a lovely, peaceful part of the city now, and I walk through it often. I stop in to see Jacques’s name, maybe make a small nod, and then I’ll walk out, following Henri, Jacques, Alex and Sala’s footsteps for a little while. Then I diverge, walking my own way as I cross the river, and go home.
