House of Glass by Hadley Freeman
Of late, there has been a spate of narrative non-fiction books that involve an author journeying into their family history and its connections with the Holocaust. A case could be made for Edmund de Waal’s 2010 The Hare with Amber Eyes being the progenitor of the current trend. I can’t help but cast my mind even further back to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel of 1980-86 Maus. House by the Lake by Thomas Harding 2013, East West Street by Philippe Sand 2016 and The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es 2018 are more immediate examples that come to mind. These are accompanied by a plethora of memoirs and biographies of Holocaust survivors, as well as, perhaps to be considered problematic, fictionalized accounts of people’s actual experiences in the camps.
When something proves successful, and especially if it’s out of the blue, publishers tend to pile on. Witness 50 Shades of Grey or adult colouring books, within the year of those catching the public’s fancy there was a tidal wave of similar efforts. And then another year or two and the tide goes back out. Recently, the success of The Tattooist of Auschwitz has spawned a number of similar novels.
Will there be a surfeit of these sort of books? The answer should be no. There is, to be sure, the danger of romanticising, or worse fetishizing, the Holocaust, especially as regards fiction. But it is better to suffer the occasional lapses of taste then to risk allowing what took place to become just another historical event.
There are reasons there are so many books of late, both fiction and non-fiction, on this subject, as well as other aspects of the period. The Second World War ended 75 years ago. There are now fewer and fewer people left alive who lived through those events as adults. Even people who were children at the time are fast approaching the end of natural life spans. One can feel a sense urgency in getting those direct witness accounts recorded and preserved. An urgency born out of a resurgence in nationalism, in anti-Semitism, in the fêting of authoritarian leaders and of Holocaust denial. Dangerous times and it is important to keep in mind what can happen, what depths we can sink to, if we allow the world of our parents and grandparents to fade into mere history.
Hadley Freeman writes for the Guardian and she brings a journalist’s skills and experience to the telling of her family’s history. She switches effortlessly from family anecdote to historical context to current events and back again, all the while maintaining sufficient narrative drive to keep you turning the pages. Of course, it helps enormously in these personal family sagas if your ancestors led interesting lives. The book focuses on her paternal grandmother’s side, starting in a town in south-western Poland before the First World War, to Paris between the wars and on to the United States. The family’s history is at once typical and atypical. Her great-uncle Alex provides most atypical interesting life story. He had, given his background, an amazing career as a couturier and hobnobbed with the likes of Chagall, Edith Piaf and Picasso. And fought in the resistance. ‘Larger than life’ about sums it up.
In the House of Glass Freeman doesn’t shy away from both drawing the parallels between what happened in 1930s, and what’s happening in the world presently, and relating the efforts of those seeking to falsify that history.