The Book Club: Hadley Freeman on her family’s escape from Europe

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🗓️ 16 March 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

In this week’s Book Club, Sam's guest is the writer Hadley Freeman, whose new book House of Glass tells the story of 20th century jewry through the hidden history of her own family. The four Glahs siblings — one of them the writer’s grandmother — grew up in a Polish shtetl just a few miles from what was to become Auschwitz. They fled the postwar pogroms to Paris; and then had to contend with the rise of a new and still more dangerous antisemitism under the Vichy regime. Hadley traced their story through two wars and across continents, and tells Sam how the story reflects both on Jewish history and on urgent concerns of the present day. And she even offers an intriguing cameo of the teenage Donald Trump…

The Book Club is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you start listening to this podcast, we've got a special subscription offer. You can get 12
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0:24.0	Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books Club podcast.
0:27.3	I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator,
0:29.3	and this week my guest is Hadley Freeman,
0:31.9	whose new book is called House of Glass,
0:34.5	The Story and Secrets of a 20th century Jewish family.
0:38.6	Hadley, this book begins as, well, many of its type do with a dusty shoebox in a closet.
0:46.6	It does indeed.
0:47.7	Tell me about the shoebox.
0:48.7	What did you find in it?
0:49.5	I literalised the trope there.
0:51.2	So I was going through my grandmother's closet about 10 years after she died. My
0:55.0	uncle moved into her old apartment, so he'd kept all of her stuff. And I thought about writing about
0:59.5	her relationship with fashion. I was at that point a fashion writer on, sorry to tell this to
1:03.9	spectator listeners, the Guardian newspaper. And I thought I could write about her relationship with
1:08.5	clothes and how she used clothes as part of her identity. And I just saw the shoebox at the back of the closet and thought it would just have
1:14.2	another pair of, you know, old shoes in it as you would, and opened it. And it was full of letters
1:18.7	and albums and photos from the 1920s up to the 1980s, photographs that were clearly taken in a
1:24.6	concentration camp, prison plates, a drawing by Picasso,
	...

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