Ear­li­er this week, Geor­gia Hunter wrote about dis­cov­er­ing her grandfather’s per­son­al­i­ty along with his sto­ry of sur­viv­ing the Holo­caust, the inspi­ra­tion for her nov­el We Were the Lucky Ones. Geor­gia is guest blog­ging for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil this week as part of the Vis­it­ing Scribe series here on The ProsenPeo­ple.

When I was fif­teen years old, I dis­cov­ered that I came from a fam­i­ly of Holo­caust sur­vivors. Nine years lat­er, armed with a dig­i­tal voice recorder and a mole­skin note­book, I set off to unearth and record my family’s sto­ry. I spent near­ly a decade tra­vers­ing the globe, inter­view­ing fam­i­ly and dig­ging up records from every pos­si­ble source I could think of, even­tu­al­ly piec­ing togeth­er the bones of what would become my nov­el, We Were the Lucky Ones. The research was chal­leng­ing, but even more of a test was decid­ing how to put my family’s nar­ra­tive to paper — and where exact­ly to begin.

As authors often do, I spent months labor­ing over the open­ing for my book. Since many of the Kurcs lost touch with one oth­er dur­ing the war, I knew each chap­ter would need to be told from a dif­fer­ent relative’s per­spec­tive. I also knew I want­ed Chap­ter One to be told through my grandfather’s eyes, and that it would be set in a jazz club in pre-war Paris — my grand­fa­ther was my link to the fam­i­ly sto­ry, and one of his best-known life­long attrib­ut­es was his pas­sion for music.

My grand­fa­ther, Addy in the book, was the only mem­ber of his fam­i­ly who wasn’t in Poland at the start of the war. He was liv­ing in Toulouse, com­pos­ing music and work­ing as an engi­neer; often his week­ends were spent tucked away in the music halls of Paris. Sto­ry has it, he received a let­ter in the spring of 1939 from his moth­er in Poland, urg­ing him not to come home for Passover, but to stay in France; trav­el­ing across Ger­man-occu­pied Aus­tria and Czecho­slo­va­kia, his moth­er wor­ried, was too dan­ger­ous. For Addy, who hadn’t missed a fam­i­ly Seder in Radom in all of his 26 years, this let­ter was a turn­ing point: it forced him to rec­og­nize the pos­si­bil­i­ty of war, and to won­der whether he’d exist­ed, until then, under a false sense of secu­ri­ty. My idea for an open­ing chap­ter was to cap­ture this turn­ing point, while paint­ing a pic­ture of what life was like for Addy (as it was for many Euro­pean Jews) before Poland fell to the Germans.

Research­ing Paris’s 1930s jazz scene, I stum­bled upon the sto­ry of Josephine Bak­er, a young Amer­i­can enter­tain­er leg­endary for her risqué attire and osten­ta­tious dance rou­tines. Bak­er per­formed often in Mont­martre, a bohemi­an neigh­bor­hood in the city’s 18th arrondisse­ment. When I read that she didn’t always per­form alone — she was often accom­pa­nied by her dia­mond-col­lared pet chee­tah, Chiq­ui­ta — I was thrilled.

A chee­tah! I remem­ber think­ing. What more dra­mat­ic open­ing could I ask for than a saber-toothed preda­tor strolling onto the stage of a club in Mont­martre, my grand­fa­ther look­ing on from a bar stool, an arm’s length away? The cat, I ratio­nal­ized, could also be seen as a metaphor for the dan­gers to come. I wrote an open­ing para­graph I hoped would grab read­ers’ atten­tion. Here’s how it read:

A chee­tah saun­ters on stage and glares into the spot­light. The band stiff­ens. The music comes to an awk­ward halt and a hush comes over the crowd as the Grand Duc’s late-night patrons whis­per and point, eyes trained on the large spot­ted ani­mal. Addy sets his drink on the mar­ble table­top and stands, his gaze mov­ing from the cat to the trum­pet play­er squirm­ing in his seat. Some­one in the back of the smoke-filled room gives a whis­tle. The cheetah’s ears twitch. Final­ly, from behind the cur­tain a woman emerges, hold­ing a leash in one hand and wear­ing noth­ing but a bejew­eled biki­ni bot­tom and feath­ered head­dress. The room erupts. The woman waves and shim­mies toward cen­ter stage, beam­ing as the crowd cheers and the band, still trem­bling, grad­u­al­ly picks up where it left off.

As the chap­ter unfolds, I dive into my grandfather’s back­sto­ry, describ­ing his mother’s let­ter, and what it meant to him. In my revi­sions, I ago­nized over the appro­pri­ate tone. Would he have felt angered by his mother’s request? Sur­prised? Guilty, for not see­ing the signs ear­li­er? After many (many) rounds of edits, I began to real­ize that, much as I loved the shock fac­tor and ten­sion the chee­tah offered, it had begun to feel like a dis­trac­tion. The real dra­ma, I decid­ed, wasn’t in Chiq­ui­ta, but in the real­i­ty Addy would soon be forced to face.

I can see how it would have been easy for my grand­fa­ther to brush off the threats of war in the months lead­ing up to it. He did not have the ben­e­fit of the per­spec­tive we have today. And he wasn’t alone in under­es­ti­mat­ing the poten­tial for dis­as­ter. Some Parisians went so far as to call it the drôle de guerre, the Pho­ny War. Now, of course, we know what was in store.

And so, I bid adieu to the chee­tah in my open­ing, opt­ing to give her just a brief men­tion lat­er in the chap­ter. I focused instead on my grand­fa­ther, on the shad­ows of war that loomed over­head, on his unfore­see­able future. This, I decid­ed, was dra­mat­ic enough.