https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/29/house-of-glass-story-20th-century-jewish-family-hadley-freeman-review

From the glamour of Parisian fashion and fine art to dark collaboration and the Holocaust ... an engaging, skilful uncovering of family secrets that asks questions relevant today

Hadley Freeman’s captivating family memoir inscribes itself in the pantheon of family stories that connect the grandchild to the generation of the grandparents. From the Americas (I think of Gabriel García Márquez’s Living to Tell the Tale) to Africa (Aida Edemariam’s beautiful The Wife’s Tale), in an era of renewed identity politics, many wish to engage with the inter-generational connections that skip the parents.

Freeman’s focus – initiated by finding a burnished red shoebox stuffed with papers and secrets – was originally on her father’s mother, born as Sala Glahs in 1910 in Chrzanow, a small town of the Austro-Hungarian empire, not so far from Kraków. She was one of four siblings, and the intertwining of the life of Sala – who later became Sara – with that of her three older brothers encouraged Freeman to broaden her attention. The challenge for the structure and direction of a book such as this is obvious: family lives, as well as the discovery of the details, tend not to be linear.