Gluck, Diana Souhami [good novels to read in english txt] 📗

prize, she took a circuitous path – unmapped, thorny and entirely her own.

PART ONE

REBELLION

1895–1936

TWO

‘THE FAMILY’

No family could have been less attuned to rebellious displays of individualism than the Glucksteins. Patriarchal, dynastic, conformist, insular and proud, they took as their family motto the epigram ‘L’Union Fait La Force’ and featured in their family crest, as a metaphor for unity, a bundle of sticks – taken from a cautionary tract by Aesop on the perils of abandoning the group:

A husbandman who had a quarrelsome family, after having tried in vain to reconcile them by words, thought he might more readily prevail by example. So he called his sons and bade them lay a bundle of sticks before him. Then having tied them up into a fagot, he told the lads, one after another, to take it up and break it. They all tried, but tried in vain. Then untying the fagot, he gave them sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father: ‘Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for all your enemies; but differ and separate and you are undone.’

The Gluckstein family strength was based on shared business and financial interests and a profound belief in the family ideal. They clawed their way up from the East End of London by enterprise and hard work. They began in the tobacco trade and then, in the partnership of Salmon & Gluckstein, created J. Lyons & Company – the vast complex of teashops, Corner House restaurants, the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus, ‘The Strand’, ‘Regent Palace’ and ‘Cumberland’ hotels and then later the huge food manufacturing and distributing business – Lyons ice-cream, cup-cakes and the rest. They married their cousins and second cousins the Salmons, the Josephs, the Abrahams, out of trust, loyalty and business acumen and because they hardly knew anyone else. They talked of The Family in its extended sense with a big F, the family in its nuclear sense with a little f and of the ‘outside world’, which was viewed with some suspicion. Male members of The Family met daily in business, socially all dined together, worshipped together, played bridge, attended each other’s bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. They lived in the same neighbourhood, often in the same street and even, in Canfield Gardens in West Hampstead, in adjacent houses with inter-connecting doors. They named sons and daughters in honour of their grandparents, which led to a bewildering plethora of Isidores, Montagues, Samuels, Josephs, Hannahs and Helenas.

From the 1880s on they pooled their money in an entity they called The Fund, administered for the benefit of all The Family. It paid for everything: houses, health-care, education, holidays, carriages and cars. Wives and brothers-in-law put in their capital too. No one who participated in The Fund kept private wealth. Individual family members owned little but had all that money can buy. When they, their sons or unmarried daughters died, their capital and houses reverted to The Fund.

Underpinning this orderly distribution of wealth was a stern moral code. Hard work, educational achievement, parental respect, obedience, family loyalty and above all conformity to the precepts laid down by their elders and learned in childhood – those were the guiding lights. Their civic, military and academic honours, and ever-growing family trees, were recorded in bound volumes and sent to each household. They earned knighthoods, CBEs, OBEs, MBEs, mayoralties and medals. They were QCs, MPs and Councillors. There was no gambling, drinking or philandering. Pleasure was to be found in family affairs, in the honourable wooing of a suitable partner, usually a cousin, or a family week in the Majestic Hotel Vichy, or the Metropole Brighton, or in a game of bridge. There was no place whatsoever for gender bending, or the quest for self-expression, or doomed and startling romantic love, or the company of raffish artists, or the wearing of outlandish clothes. Such turbulent desires for self-expression, if felt, were no doubt promptly repressed.

The pioneer of The Family fortunes was Gluck’s grandfather, Samuel Gluckstein. Born in Rheinberg, Prussia, he came to England when he was nineteen in 1840 and lodged with his aunt in Whitechapel in the East End, the ghetto for Jewish immigrants for a hundred years. He married her daughter, his cousin – Hannah Joseph, who had nursed him through a bad illness. She was illiterate and signed her marriage certificate with a mark. In the manner of the time children were born with predictable frequency. They had twelve of whom ten survived.

To provide for them all he worked first as a cigar salesman then as a cigar manufacturer. When machine-made cigarettes became popular, he set up in partnership with his brother and cousin as general tobacconists. The partnership did not last. He was reputed to be ‘violent and overbearing’. There were rows and, when he wished to withdraw the £2000 capital he claimed to have invested in the business, these rows escalated into a Chancery Division suit for the dissolution of the partnership. The lawsuit lasted a year, involved sixty-nine sworn affidavits, lacerated family unity, broke his health and took them all to the brink of bankruptcy. The partnership was dissolved in 1870 and all the stock – tons of tobacco, cigars, utensils and effects – sold by auction and the assets divided between them.

Though ill (he died three years later in 1873), he started up in the tobacco business once more, this time in partnership with his trusted son-in-law, Barnett Salmon, and with three of his sons, Isidore, Montague and Gluck’s father, Joseph. They traded under the name of Salmon & Gluckstein. The old man died without seeing the rise in the family fortunes. His sons, aged twenty-two, nineteen and seventeen at the time of his death, built the firm he had founded into an Empire.

They had seen the internecine effect of family feuds and resolved to avoid them. Which was why they started The Fund. It was