Introduction

The Book Club will return next week! In the meantime we are revisiting Sam’s conversation from 2020 with Hadley Freeman whose 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 urgent concerns of the present day. She even offers an intriguing cameo of the teenage Donald Trump…