As a girl, Hadley Freeman found her grandmother Sara a perplexing and distant figure. “If pressed, I would have said she was ‘weird’, but what I meant was that she seemed sad, and sad adults are confusing for children,” writes Freeman. Just what lay behind that sadness, however, was something that Freeman would only learn after her grandmother died, in the process of writing this book. She would learn, too, about the lives of her grandmother’s three brothers, and find in the Glass siblings (fittingly, given the name they adopted) a lens onto Jewish life in the twentieth century.
Henri, Jacques, Alex and Sara Glass were born in the early 1900s to two peasant Jews in the village of Chrzanów (now in Poland, then in Austro-Hungary). Their original names were…
