What an amazing story. The author takes us along as she researches her family history.
A beautifully written personal history that is intriguing, extremely well researched and an entertaining read. So glad I ordered a hard copy of this one as it has numerous photos places throughout the book that really added to the enjoyment of the read. It's certainly one to place on my real life book shelf.

I love family history stories and can identify with the author about the intrigue and excitement of discovering family secrets and pasts while researching our ancestors to know more about who they were and the lives they led. While most of our ancestors led ordinary and uneventful lives there are many of those who have held secrets that have suprised us.

After her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she’d never really known. Sala Glass was a European expat in America – defiantly clinging to her French influences, famously reserved, fashionable to the end – yet to Hadley much of her life remained a mystery. Sala’s experience of surviving one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history was never spoken about.
When Hadley found a shoebox filled with her grandmother’s treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of Sala and her three brothers. The search takes Hadley from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz.

I was in awe of Sala and her story and the hand she was dealt and while readers might not sympathise with her and especially if you have read other holocaust family stories you may feel she should have been "grateful" but I really felt for her, as she lost what her hopes and dreams and the closeness of her family and that even having to feel" grateful" becomes a burden in itself. I am always facinated to read how war survivors who have suffered so many injustices and hardships manage to adapt and make a new life for themselves in foreign countries.
I can imagine how exciting researching and writing this book must have been for the auhtor and turing up new information, travelling to locations and walking in her ancestors footsteps, discovering names and connections must have been such a rewarding experience and quite an achievement.

I really enjoyed the read and delighted to place this one on my favourites shelf.
Readers who enjoy family history stories/histories such as [b:Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations|1948737|Mosaic A Chronicle of Five Generations|Diane Armstrong|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312002648l/1948737._SX50_.jpg|1971133]

[bc:Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations|1948737|Mosaic A Chronicle of Five Generations|Diane Armstrong|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312002648l/1948737._SX50_.jpg|1971133] may well enjoy this book too. ( )

This is an excellent book that tells about the Polish-Jewish Glass family. The mother and her four children left Poland between the two world wars to settle in Paris. Just before the second world war broke out, Sala, one of the siblings, went to live in the United States. The book is written by Sala's granddaughter.
Freeman does a great job of weaving the story of her family with the history of European Jews of that time. She tells about the pogroms that drove the Glass family from their homeland. She talks about the anti-semitic acts of the French that killed one sibling and drove others into hiding and into the French resistance. And how leaving France for the United States saved the life of another.
Anti-semitism, persecution, assimilation, personal achievement -- all the modern Jewish issues are talked about. ( )

This family had many interesting experiences, and the attitudes of their families and communities also added to the interest. However, there were too many unimportant details. The author also inserted what she thought were people's motivations, and this was not always appropriate. ( )

A group biography of the Glahs family, starting in Chrzanow, Galicia (then Austro Hungarian empire, now in Poland) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Recording the poor but vibrant Jewish community in 1900, followed by persecution of Jews and Polish progroms following the First World War, leading to the Glass (sic) family emigrating to France in the 1920’s.
Freeman then writes short memoirs of the lives of her paternal grandmother and great-uncles, describing how each adapted (or not) to living in Paris and then the threat of antisemitism both from Germany, following it becoming a Nazi state in 1933, and from the French state itself.
In 1937 Sara (Hadley Freeman’s grandmother) travels to the US to marry Bill Freiman, basically an arranged marriage, to escape from Europe, on the basis that this will enable the remainder of her family to emigrate to the US to escape the rise of antisemitism in Europe. Unfortunately this does not happen and we follow the stories of how those in Europe survived, or not, the Nazi occupation of France.
Following the end of the war, the stories continue to show how each surviving sibling lived, with their successes and failures.
An excellent group biography which by looking at individual lives tells the story of European Jews in the twentieth century.
As Freeman says in the final chapter: “The Glasses spanned the twentieth century, from Henri’s birth in 1901 to Alex’s death in 1999. They lived through probably the most dramatic shifts ever endured by the world’s Jews, from the Holocaust to American immigration to the founding of Israel to assimilation, and their lives reflected it all. On an individual level, they took chances that are unimaginable to their children and grandchildren today, because we live in comfort that they created for us.” ( )

Read in the Standard ab