Club News and Activities

Reader’s Corner

  • October 2024
  • Faina Menzul

From the award-winning author and journalist Stephen P. Kiernan comes The Glass Chateau, an uplifting story of hope, healing, and redemption set in post-World War II France. After exuberant parades and celebrations end, the French people realize how much work will be needed to restore their country from the destruction brought by the endless years of war. Although the war is over, fighting is still going on. Resistance fighters, emerging from hiding, seek vengeance a g a i n s t t h e i r f o r m e r neighbors who collaborated
with Germans.
In a small seaside village in the Champagne-Ardenne region, a young Jewish man named Asher emerges after fighting for four years with the Resistance. His parents, grandparents, and four brothers are all gone, transported East by the Germans. His beautiful wife and baby daughter were shot on the street by a German officer. His house is in ruin, and the village’s synagogue burned to the ground.
Before the war Asher was an artisan cobbler renowned for his high quality and intricately designed boots. Asher finds his shop destroyed and his instruments gone. All alone, desperate, and hungry, Asher feels he has nothing left to live for, when an old woman tells him “something good” is going on nearby. When Asher turns to ask her for directions, the old crone is gone. After wandering the countryside for days Asher finally stumbles upon an old Chateau set high on a hill. A woman in a courtyard tells Asher “there is no place for him” at the Chateau, but leaves him a plate of food. Famished, Asher wolfs down the food. Grateful for the first meal he has had in days, Asher enters a large workshop where several men work in front of a scorching furnace. He helps carry heavy logs to feed the furnace. Pleased with his hard work, Mark, the glass studio master allows Asher to stay for supper and later gives him a place to sleep.
Mark and Brigitte, owners of the 450-year-old Chateau Guerin famous for its glass works, are determined to restore the studio that was almost destroyed during the war. Devout Christians, they turn the Chateau into a sanctuary for men who are emotionally scarred by the war. Realizing that all of the Chateau residents are Christians, though, Asher decides to hide his Jewish identity for fear of being cast out.
The men work long hours in front of the blazing furnace that turns sand into glass. They are weary and distrustful of each other, guarding terrible secrets of the recent past. Asher finds that creating images in stained glass is similar to cutting intricate designs in leather. Seeing his work, Mark assigns Asher the task of creating new altar windows for the village church that were destroyed by the Germans. Searching for an appropriate theme, Asher recalls Torah stories he learned as a boy. He creates images of peace and forgiveness, even
though he is fearful that they may reveal his Jewish identity. Working on the stained glass designs helps Asher regain the Faith he had lost during the war. Also, his images enable other Chateau men come to terms with their past failings, and to search for resolutions to their personal struggles. The men begin to care about each other, even as their identities are revealed.
In The Glass Chateau the author delivers a poignant and complicated story of hope and renewal enabled by the power of art. Marc Chagall, a famous French-Jewish artist, served as inspiration for this novel after the author discovered that Chagall literally “revolutionized” the art of stained glass, and designed many stained glass windows throughout Europe and the United States. In 1968 Chagall was commissioned to design stained glass panels behind the main altar at the Reims Cathedral, a magnificent ninth century church that was a coronation site of the French kings for hundreds of years.