Stained Glass

In Stained Glass, Flora Cassen traces a Jewish life shaped by family and history, moving between medieval Europe and the present to connect lived experience with the longer arc of Jewish history. Drawing on her upbringing in Antwerp’s Jewish community and her grandparents’ escape from Nazi-occupied Europe to the Belgian Congo, Cassen writes from within a past in which powerlessness rubbed shoulders with power. From her later life in the United States, she considers Jewish life in Europe as a mirror that reflects enduring questions about vulnerability and belonging. Stained Glass asks what it means to leave Europe behind and to encounter in American Jewish life a vitality that is strikingly beautiful yet never fully settled.