Rabbi Hugo Gryn’s grandson’s tragic story to become TV mini-series

The American author of this summer’s hit book London Falling has revealed that it is being developed as a “British-style” mini-series, with the production company currently in talks with writers. 

Patrick Radden Keefe also described the book, which tells the true story of Zac Brettler, the 19-year-old grandson of Rabbi Hugo Gryn who fell to his death in 2019 from a block of flats overlooking the Thames, and the family secrets it explores.

Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker whose other books include the acclaimed Say Nothing, was speaking on the second day of the Cliveden Literary Festival in Buckinghamshire. He said film producers had expressed immediate interest after his initial article about Zac’s mysterious death appeared in the magazine but he put them off because he first wanted to complete the book, which grew out of the article. 

Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, spoke at length with Keefe following a chance introduction in 2023 that came after an inconclusive police inquiry. He went on to investigate Zac’s life and death in detail, uncovering much new information. 

Keefe, who was in conversation with the journalist Misha Glenny on Sunday, told the audience he was struck by the parallels between the double life Zac had led as a teenager and the secrets kept by the late Rabbi Gryn. Zac would tell new people he met that he was the son of an oligarch, that his mother was dead and that he lived in a huge house in St John’s Wood. These elaborate lies ultimately drew him into the murky world of London gangland deals.  

Gryn, an Auschwitz survivor who arrived in the UK speaking no English, had secrets of his own. One of them, Keefe said, “and it’s not even the big one”, was the lie that he had studied at Cambridge. The bigger revelation, in 1988, about Gryn’s secret family is also discussed in the book. 

The future leading Reform rabbi had thought “if I want to have the life that I want to have, I’m going to have to build a little bridge between where I am now and where I want to be, and that bridge will be a degree from Cambridge”, Keefe said. “I think he had this country right. He did the math and … the amazing thing was Hugo died [in 1996] without anybody knowing.” 

The author thought it was no coincidence that Zac was at the impressionable age of 16 and entering the sixth form at a new school when Donald Trump was first elected president.

“In 2016, you look around and you see certain people who fake it till they make it. They lie. They’ve been bad at everything they’ve ever done, but they are constantly telling people they’re a success. And when people don’t believe them, they lie harder.  

“In 2016, I think you probably felt like you could do that, and you could go all the way to the top … This personality type, the kind of chancer who makes it, is very prevalent in our culture, here and in the US.” 

Keefe also spoke about the open and trusting relationship he developed with Zac’s parents. He said that while the book might read like a mystery thriller, it was also very much a story about parenting and grief. 

“I’m working in what I think of as a kind of literary idiom, but everything is factual, and it’s important for me to maintain my objectivity. But objectivity doesn’t mean that you bring your emotional temperature down below zero. If I’m listening to the Brettlers talk, I feel my heart wrenching. I want to feel that.”

He added that, towards the end of his work on the book, he met Matthew and Rachelle for dinner in Maida Vale. They mentioned that they had recently returned from a concert in Las Vegas. “And I said, ‘How are you able to do that? I think if I were you, I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed since 2019.’ 

“Simultaneously, they both said, ‘Oh, it’s our fathers. We grew up with these fathers who survived the Holocaust as boys.’ Both of them lost virtually their whole families. Both arrived in the UK as teenagers solo in the world, and had to invent these new lives.  

“It was a lesson by example. They both, in a way they probably never realised they would need, grew up with this astonishing example of fathers who had learned to live, and live joyously, in the face of catastrophic loss.”