Hello, I'm Sam Leith. I'm sorry Book Club has been on such a long hiatus over the Christmas season,

but we return to full normal service next week. In the meantime, here's another from the archives.

It's Hadley Freeman's discussing her remarkable family memoir, House of Glass.

Hello, and welcome to The Spectator Books Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator, and this week my guest is Hadley Freeman,

whose new book is called House of Glass, the Story and Secrets of a 20th century Jewish family. Hadley, this book begins as, well, many of its type do with a dusty shoebox in a closet.

It does indeed. Tell me about the shoebox. What did you find in it? I literalized the trope there.

So I was going through my grandmother's closet about 10 years after she died. My uncle moved into her old apartment, so he'd kept all her stuff.

And I thought about writing about her relationship with fashion.

I was at that point a fashion writer on,

I'm sorry to tell this to spectator listeners, the Guardian newspaper.

And I thought I could write about her relationship with 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 another pair of, you know,

old shoes in it as you would, and opened it. And it was full of letters and albums and photos from

the 1920s up to the 1980s, photographs that were clearly taken in a concentration camp, prison

plates, a drawing by Picasso, I'm shoved in as an

afterthought at the bottom, denunciation letters written during the war in French, and at that

point I thought, bloody hell, it's going to be more than a fashion piece, isn't it?

Yeah.

Let's start with your grandmother.

I mean, it ends up being a book that's about really quite a big family, and, you know, it goes from the sort of Polish stettel to the Parisian salons to Long Island.

...