Chapter 1: The Glahs Family--The Shtetl Chapter 1 THE GLAHS FAMILY-THE SHTETL Austria-Hungary, 1900s Sala (center) with her Ornstein cousins in Chrzanow in about 1916 Henri, Jacques, Alex, and Sara Glass loved being French, and the reason was that they weren''t French and their names weren''t Henri, Jacques, Alex, and Sara Glass. They were born Jehuda, Jakob, Sender, and Sala Glahs in what is now Poland but was then still Austria-Hungary. This caused further confusion about the nationality of the Glasses in life and death: Alex was often described in newspaper articles in his lifetime as "Austrian," and Sala''s death certificate states her place of birth simply as "Austria." This was echoed by several of her friends from later in life who told me that she spent her early years "in Vienna, I think." In fact, Sala grew up more than 250 miles from Vienna, and the Glahs family probably never visited what is now Austria at all. They were from Chrzanow, once a busy market town whose name derives, with a memorable lack of romanticism, from the Polish word for horseradish ( chrzan ), a local specialty. Its region was more elegantly named Galicia, in what is now Poland''s southwest corner. Chrzanow was a typical early-twentieth-century eastern European shtetl, or Jewish village, the kind that''s so familiar from popular culture that even those who lived there describe it through the prism of art, flattening reality to something close to cliché.

The very few times my grandmother referred to her childhood she talked about it in reference to Fiddler on the Roof, and the memoir of a townsperson who lived there at the same time as the Glahs siblings described its picturesque side streets as looking "like those in Chagall''s paintings, poor and crooked." 1 When I visited Chrzanow in 2018 my guide compared it to the towns in stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. But Chrzanow has its own unique qualities that lift it beyond the generic. Back when the Glahses lived there, it was known for its surrounding dark forests of densely packed silver birch trees where the children would hide to avoid their parents and schoolteachers. It also had an exceptionally pretty central square, fringed with colorful houses and shops, where people from miles away would come to do their shopping. Today it is better known for the more dubious accolade of being only 12.5 miles from Auschwitz, so close the two towns considered themselves to be sisters. None of the Glahs siblings ever spoke about their childhoods, and if they mentioned Poland at all they''d spit with disgust and move on, no elaboration necessary.

So, without personal anecdotes to act as my starting point, I turned to historical documents. If my family had been one of the famous Jewish dynasties--the Rothschilds, say, or the Freuds, or even the Halberstams, a wealthy family who lived in the region at the time--this would have sufficed. But they were not, and it did not. There aren''t many records of the individual billions of poorer lives from Europe''s past, people who leave only footprints in the sand that blow away as soon as they are buried; people who leave, at most, unidentifiable black-and-white photos behind them--their faces blankly solemn for the photographer''s studio, the flash bleaching them of personality--or perhaps a brief mention in a census locked away in an obscure government vault that proves they once existed and nothing more. These people are merely referred to by history as "the poor," "the peasants," "the illiterate," even though their lives are far more revealing of the times in which they lived than those of the grander families whose lives are faithfully recorded ever after by historians. My father mentioned that back in the 1970s my great-uncle Alex claimed to have written a memoir, which was never published, but my father couldn''t remember if he''d ever even seen it, let alone read it. If it existed at all, it had surely long been thrown away, but it seemed more likely that this was another one of Alex''s many implausible boasts, that he once wrote a memoir that somehow no one had ever seen. The idea that Alex could have ever had the patience to sit down and write an entire book seemed about as likely as my hanging out with Picasso.

But one day in 2014, my father''s younger brother, Rich, emailed from Florida: he had found Alex''s memoir among my grandmother''s possessions. A week later it arrived, a bulky FedEx package, the pages untouched for at least twenty years, since my grandmother died. It was typed in French on loose-leaf paper and Alex had almost certainly dictated it to an assistant who then typed it up, because it read just as Alex talked, in his gruff, colloquial, rat-a-tat stream of consciousness: "I still have my Yiddish accent. I''ve never tried to correct it. I love Yiddish. It is my mother tongue. The language I spoke when I knew hunger. When I fought those degenerate Poles who wished me dead," he wrote on the first page.

It was like he was standing in front of me in his flat in Paris, shaking his finger wildly, as if jabbing it at invisible opponents. (The first time I saw Joe Pesci in a movie I nearly fell off my seat in shock because, if you swap the Italian heritage for a Jewish one, Pesci looks--and talks, and swaggers, and gesticulates--a lot like my great-uncle Alex did.) My father, with characteristic heroism, translated all 250 pages of Alex''s memoir for me from French to English. (My French is fine, but in no way is it strong enough to handle Alex''s punchy slang with occasional swoops into Yiddish.) But before he sent the translation back to me, he warned me to read it with at the very least a skeptical eye: Alex''s tendency toward self-mythology was infamous, and not even those closest to him ever really believed the things he said about himself. So, while this memoir was an astonishing find, I opened it expecting to read a somewhat deadening litany of Alex''s triumphs. Instead, I was amazed to discover that the first thirty pages or so was a detailed and humble account of his childhood in Chrzanow, a period of his life he certainly never discussed with any of us. Instead of focusing on himself and his glories, he wrote heartfelt descriptions of his family and their struggles, and lives that had been hidden in darkness for over a century burst into the light.

Jews had lived in Chrzanow since 1590, when the town''s first Jew, a man called Yaakov, settled there.2 Yaakov clearly had quite an impact, because by the beginning of the twentieth century more than 60 percent of the town''s inhabitants were Jewish,3 and one of its main industries was manufacturing Judaica, such as Torah scrolls and mezuzahs.4 The town square was bordered by 120 specifically Jewish shops, their signs written in both Hebrew and Yiddish, while the open market within was where women shopped for kosher food and headscarves. When the Glahs children were born, Chrzanow even had a Jewish mayor, Dr. Zygmunt Keppler, a lawyer. From its top office to its lowest social order, Chrzanow was a Jewish town. This was the tail end of what was a brief and relatively golden age for Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anti-Semitism certainly existed there, most infamously in the Hilsner Affair, a series of trials that took place in 1899-1900, in which a Jew, Leopold Hilsner, was accused of blood libel and spent nineteen years in prison before finally being pardoned.

But Emperor Franz Joseph I had a fondness for the Jewish religion, and under his rule, Austro-Hungarian Jews emerged from the ghettos and became part of society as the emperor gave Jews equal rights, and financed Jewish institutions. This is why there seems to have been such a flourishing of Jewish productivity in the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1848 and 1916, from such people as Theodore Herzl, Stefan Zweig, and Sigmund Freud: it''s not that this generation of Jews was uniquely talented compared with previous ones, it''s that they were granted a then-unique amount of freedom. The Chrzanovian Jews were mostly poor, but their lives were better than they ever had been or would be again. They had a friendly relationship with the Catholic Poles in the neighboring countryside who came into town to go to church, do their shopping, and take their children to school, where they were taught alongside the Jewish children.5 Chrzanow also had a great financial advantage in its proximity to the Three Emperors'' Corner, the border dividing Russia, Germany, and Austria, and the city lay on the main highway that connected eastern and western Europe, meaning traders from all over came through it. So, although it was a very Jewish town, it was also a very international one, and the townspeople regularly mixed with many other ethnicities and nationalities. Back then, this was a wonderful financial advantage for the town''s Jews; very soon, it would become one of their greatest misfortunes. One person who never trusted her neighbors was Chaya Rotter.

Born in 1873 and the youngest of three children, she grew up in Chrzanow. Despite her lifelong closeness to multiple other countries, she spoke only Yiddish and Polish. She had little interest in mixing with anyone but her own kind. On March 13, 1898, when she was twenty-five, she married someone who was ostensibly her kind in a wedding arranged by her parents. Reuben Glahs was a Jewish scholar five years younger than she and also from Chrzanow. But in truth, they were a deeply unlikely couple, in looks as much as temperament. In the very few photos that remain of her it is clear she was a large woman, solid rather than fat, with much-remar.