Personal Space: Hadley Freeman on Finding Out the Tall Family Tales Were All True

This is Personal Space: The Memoir Show, with Sari Botton. On this episode, Botton talks to Hadley Freeman about her fourth book, House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family, a memoir and family Holocaust history published by Simon & Schuster. Botton and Freeman discuss Picasso, present day anti-Semitism, and, that elusive thing, hope. Freeman’s local indie is Primrose Hill Books in London; please order through their website (if you’re in London) or through Bookshop.

From the episode: 

Sari Botton: Of all the things you discovered while researching this book, what was the most surprising?

Hadley Freeman: Well everything my great uncle Alex told me was true. He told stories of escaping from trains and standing up to Nazi’s in nightclubs, like some figure from Casablanca, and all these other stories… and also about these friendships with I.M. Pei, Picasso, Chagall. Everyone used to say, when he was alive, “Take everything he says with a grain of salt.” It turned out everything was true. I did archival research, went from Picasso’s letters, and Alex himself was spied on, watched in that time—everything he said was true.