Skip to main content

House of Glass by Hadley Freeman review – flight and fight of a Jewish family

Hadley Freeman’s gripping family biography of persecution and escape offers lessons for our own time

Deep inside her paternal grandmother’s closet, behind the leather handbags, the elegant dresses wrapped in dry-cleaner plastic, all giving off a whiff of Guerlain face powder mixed with Chanel perfume, the Guardian writer Hadley Freeman discovered a shoebox covered in years of dust. Its contents deflected her from the fashion piece she had been intending to write about her unsettling, melancholic French grandmother, now dead for some 10 years, and ever out of place in the America where they all lived. Instead, the photos, documents and mysterious fragments the shoebox contained set her off on a quest. It grew into a capacious family story that moves from Poland to France to America and brings to vivid life some of the worst, and perhaps also finest, moments of the 20th century.

Freeman is a determined and eloquent detective. She sifts records, has translations of documents done and travels often with her father to the sites of ancestral life. Above all, she is a splendid creator of character. As she roots around in a past that moves from persecution and the extreme poverty of a Jewish family in the southwestern corner of Poland, to interwar immigrant life in the then unglamorous Marais district of Paris, to the turbulence and death of the war years and beyond, the members of her great and grandparental family take on memorable individuality. What is fascinating to note is that it is some of the forebears she likes least who emerge as distinct heroes.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2VmAOrF
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more