Episode 15: Georgia Hunter
On Discovering her Family’s Jewish History and Kindness as Resistance
Georgia Hunter’s Five Books:
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Send for Me by Lauren Fox
James by Percival Everett
The Lost Baker of Vienna (galley) by Sharon Kurtzman
One Good Thing by Georgia Hunter
For feedback or author recommendations please email us at team@fivebookspod.org
Find us online at www.fivebookspod.org
The Five Books has the advisory and promotional support of the Jewish Book Council. Jewish Book Council is a nonprofit dedicated to amplifying and celebrating Jewish literature and supporting authors and readers. Stay up to date on the latest in Jewish literature! https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/events/celebrate
The Five Books is fiscally sponsored by FJC, a 501c3 public charity.
Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
When Georgia Hunter was fifteen years old, she discovered that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors. Years later, she embarked on a journey of intensive research, determined to unearth and record her family’s remarkable story. The result is the New York Times best seller, We Were the Lucky Ones, which has been published in over 20 languages and adapted for television by Hulu as a highly acclaimed limited series. One Good Thing is Georgia’s second novel.
In our conversation, Georgia will talk about the hold that multi-generational Holocaust stories have on her, about kindness as resistance, and her realization after publishing her family’s story that she could write another book.
-
The Five Books: Georgia Hunter on Discovering Her Family’s Jewish History and Kindness as Resistance
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them.My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Every week I ask Jewish authors about five books in five categories. We'll hear about two Jewish books that have impacted the author's Jewish identity. We'll hear about one book, not necessarily Jewish, that they think everyone should read, a book that changed their worldview. We'll get a peek into what book the author is reading now, and we'll get to hear about the new book they've just published and how it came about.
Today we'll be talking with Georgia Hunter about her new novel, One Good Thing. The story begins in Italy in 1940. Lili and Esti have been best friends since meeting at the University of Ferrara. By the time Esti's son Theo is born, they've become as close as sisters. Both Jewish, the pair believe themselves safe until Germany invades Northern Italy and they find themselves in occupied territory.
Georgia Hunter:
In the end, it's a story of friendship and motherhood and survival. And for me, it really served as a reminder that love, even amidst darkness and fear and uncertainty, can be reason to keep going.When Georgia Hunter was 15 years old, she discovered that her grandfather was Jewish and she came from a family of Holocaust survivors. Years later, she embarked on a journey of intensive research, determined to unearth and record her family's remarkable story. The result is the New York Times bestseller, We Were the Lucky Ones, which has been published in over 20 languages and adapted for television by Hulu as a highly acclaimed limited series. One Good Thing is Georgia's second novel. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two sons.
In our conversation, Georgia will talk about the hold that multi-generational Holocaust stories have on her, about kindness as resistance, and her realization after publishing her family's story that she could write another book.
When my editor at Penguin called and said, okay, what's next? I was really taken aback because I hadn't thought about what was next. To be honest, like I had thought of myself as the granddaughter and the family historian. And this was my passion project. It took me nine years to do this. I, I just, I hadn't wrapped my head around the fact that now I was an author.
That and more, all coming up next.
Welcome to The Five Books, Georgia. Thank you so much for joining me. I loved reading One Good Thing. I thought it was just a beautifully crafted novel. It really captured the complexity of family, friends and friends as chosen family, loss and fear in a way that I think leaves the reader feeling profoundly moved. So thank you for writing it and for sharing it with us.
That's so kind. Thank you so much and thanks for having me.
Yeah. Okay, so Georgia, if you could give us the quick synopsis for One Good Thing.
Sure, sure. So yeah, so One Good Thing is — it tells the story of Italy's little known Holocaust-era past through the eyes of a young woman named Lili. You meet her at the tail end of 1940 in the north of Italy in a town called Ferrara. She's got a best friend at university named Esti, who's a couple of years older and who's from Greece. And the book actually opens with the birth of Esti's son, Theo.
There's at this point a war being fought across borders, but in Italy, life somehow goes on until Germany invades and the best friends and Theo find themselves in occupied territory. Esti asks Lili to go on the run with Theo and to protect him while Lili can't. And Lili ends up setting out on this epic journey through Nazi occupied villages and bombed-out cities, doing everything in her power to keep Theo safe. So in the end, it's a story of friendship and motherhood and survival. And for me, it really served as a reminder that love, even amidst darkness and fear and uncertainty, can be reason to keep going.
It's a beautiful story and we'll get to talk about it in depth. Your first book was We Were the Lucky Ones, which was a beautiful book and your author's note in that book could be its own memoir, documentary, etc. It's a really incredible family story. So in it you write about the fact that you found out when you were 15 after your grandfather had passed away that he was a Jew and that he was a Holocaust survivor. And now you've told Lili's story as well, but I wonder if you could talk to us, given that we are, you know, talking about Jewish books and Jewish identity, how you relate to that piece of yourself and think about your own identity.
Sure. Yeah, it was quite a discovery to make at 15 years old that my grandfather was Polish Jewish and that he came from a big family of Holocaust survivors. It just, it wasn't a part of our dialogue, even though we were close. I grew up a mile from my grandparents, Eddie and Caroline, Addie in the book. And so I think, I think for me, what it did was it sparked a whole lot of questions and a whole lot of curiosity. And it was thanks to a high school English assignment, by the way, I had to go out and interview a relative for one of those projects where it's a roots project. You learn a little bit about your ancestry. So that's when his story came to light. And then about five years later, I found myself at a family reunion hosted by my mom, which has become the first of now, like every year we all get together. But this was in the year 2000 and it was the first of many. And she is one of ten first cousins of the second generation. So my grandfather being the first generation of survivors. And they're from all over the world, like Brazil, Israel, France, Colombia, across the states, you name it.
And it was at that reunion that I started hearing stories that were unlike anything I'd ever heard before. Whether it was Jose talking about being born in the Siberian Gulag or Anna talking about her mother hiking over the Austrian Alps or the disguised circumcisions or the mother-daughter escape from the ghetto. Like the stories were — they kept going. And that's when I remember really having the moment where I thought “someone needs to write these stories down.” Like, first of all, how have I never heard them? And, and someone needs to write them down.
And it took me another eight years to get the courage to go be that person. But during the process, I learned so much, not only about my family story and how my relatives somewhat miraculously managed to survive, but about myself and about the religion and this piece of me that I never knew existed growing up as a kid. And it was so rewarding and it was so sort of grounding in a way to get to know myself in that way and also to get to know my relatives because I spent so much time interviewing — well, I interviewed Felicia. I got to speak with her firsthand. She was a baby at the start of the war. Otherwise I was interviewing my mom's generation, so the cousins.
But through them, I felt like I got to know my ancestors in a way that I never would have. I got to know the religion in a way I never would have. And I think I also had those eye-opening moments over and over again where I saw, I could feel how, even though my grandfather never talked about the fact that he was raised in the Jewish faith and he chose not to raise his family in the faith, he passed so much of himself down to me. So it was really those traits that I feel like I recognize so deeply now in myself and in my kids and in all of my relatives and whether that's, you know, being quite stubborn, the resilience, sort of never taking no for an answer, the love of family, of mealtime, the laughter, the levity with which he lived his life, the optimistic lens that he had on life. So I feel so, so much more connected to both sides. I can't say I'm an expert on all things Judaism, but I feel like I know the role it played in his life and the role it now plays in mine. And it’s very, it was a very rewarding process.
You could feel so much how the extent to which you immersed yourself in their lives and in their story, it must have been just a really profound experience for you.
I say sometimes that the researching and writing of the story — which is essentially uncovering a part of my DNA, right? Like a part of who I am and why I am — then changed my DNA, you know, like it just made me a different person. So it was, profound is a good word. It was very eye-opening and very beautiful.
Well, if anyone hasn't read it or even seen the beautiful Hulu adaptation of it, you should definitely go back and read We Were the Lucky Ones as well, and One Good Thing.
Book One: a Jewish book from childhood — Maus by Art Spiegelman.
Yeah, I have my copy, my original copy here. It's, like, got stains on it. I will never forget picking up this book. First of all, it came out, I mean, it came out in like the late 80s, I think, when graphic novels weren't really even a thing yet. So it's a graphic novel. It's Art Spiegelman. It's his attempt to tell the story of his father. So it's his way of capturing his father's story, who was a Holocaust survivor, sort of from his perspective as the son of a survivor. And I've seen his interviews, I've been to some of his events and he says he didn't write it —because a lot of kids read it now in schools if it's not banned, which is a whole nother conversation we could have — but he said he didn't write it for kids, he really wrote it for himself as an answer to the question of like why he's here today. Because if left to the odds, same for me and probably for most of us, his parents shouldn't have lived.
But I just found it so kind of eye-opening to read in my twenties, well before We Were the Lucky Ones was written and have this experience of second generation, I'm third generation, but trying to tell the story in a way that felt kind of new and different. And it made me just realize, first off it's so touching and so hauntingly beautiful and the way he depicts the story with illustration, it just feels like it came straight from his heart. It's just gorgeous. But it's just a reminder that there's so many ways to tell a story. And I, you know, I was at that point probably in the very, very early stages when I first read it, of understanding my family history. And then I came back to it as I was writing my book. And I think it's a wonderful lesson in how deeply you can reach readers in many different mediums. And with this graphic novel, I think it's just brilliant. And my son's 11, and I'm going to have him read it pretty soon, I think.
Actually, my son's in ninth grade, they're reading it right now.
Are they? Oh, that’s so great!
I was going to ask. Well, first of all, so you read this as an adult already.
I read it as a young adult, or like, late teens, and then I picked it back up again when I was thinking about how to tell my family story.
And when you were a kid, you know, before you found out about your grandfather, what were you aware of about Judaism or Jewish people?
I had a friend and we would spend Passovers together, like our family would go to her house, so I was aware of that tradition and the beauty of coming together around a table and then the sort of the weight of the stories that were being told around that table and the different kinds of foods and I loved, I loved all the traditions involved with it. But aside from that, like, I think part of the reason my grandfather probably chose not to keep the faith was that he ended up settling in a little town in Massachusetts where there were no other Jews and there were no other Poles. His siblings all landed in cities like Skokie or parts of New York or Rio or Sao Paulo where there were large communities of Jews and it was easy for them to fall into, into those communities and immerse themselves.
Whereas my grandfather, I'm certain, even though I never had the chance to ask him, was probably quite concerned about fitting in and assimilating when he had seen what being Jewish could have and should have done for his family. I do know, so, you even though he didn't talk about the faith, and I asked my mom about this a lot too, like, well, what did you know about it, like growing up? And she said, well, I knew that it meant so much to him, even though, you know, my grandmother, I should mention, you know, is American Presbyterian. They met in Rio and I don't think if he had said, like, I want to raise the family in the Jewish faith, I don't think she would have objected. But again, I think it was his way of assimilating and to keep protecting his family at the time when there was still, you know, discrimination and anti-Semitism and he lost a job because of his faith right when he moved to the States. So it was very much a part of his daily presence. But my mom always said that he would talk about his mother's challah bread and like with this, like, twinkle in his eye and they would go to the Jewish deli and he would travel back to San Paolo where many of his family had settled.
And he might say that he was going for his shared birthday with his sister, Helena, but in fact, it would be, also happened to be coinciding with Passover. So, so it's so interesting to look back and see the little signs of what it meant to him. And now to kind of carry the tradition on, but as a kid, it really wasn't even, it wasn't, it was barely on my radar, you know, and I was 11 when he got sick, and so like 15, 16 is that age where I think you start looking a little outward, you're less self-centered and starting to ask questions about who you are and why you are the way you are. So I sure wish I had more time to ask him questions.
And you know in Maus, Spiegelman writes about his difficult relationship with his father. There's one portion where he writes about his father telling him, “don't include this in the story.” And I just wondered if those were decisions that you faced as well, of what to include, what not to include.
I feel very lucky in that there was nothing that I could not include and I didn't run up against any sort of feedback like that when I was interviewing. Of course, before I set out, I sent an email to each of the cousins saying, “this is something I would like to do. Are you open to it?” And the immediate response was, yes, like we've all been sort of talking and thinking or dreaming about bringing our story together. Everybody sort of had their little piece of the pie, if you will, but no one had raised their hand to say, I'll be the one to try to tie it all together and tell the complete story. So I think they were just so grateful that, you know, someone was, was wanting to do this. And so when I met with them, it was nothing but support and love and open dialogue. And to be honest, I mean, the stories — I was able to uncover the bare bones of how my family survived, but like I used every bit of information I was able to acquire in those oral histories. And then I had to supplement with outside research as well. You know, a memory might have been shared also in a very black and white way with distance and with stoicism. And then I'd have to go back, all right, well, she said it was cold when they crossed the river, so it must've been winter. You know, I'd have to put it into the timeline, or she said that the ghetto was burning, okay, it was either the Warsaw ghetto uprising or the Polish uprising and I'd have to kind of piece together history with what they remembered and remind myself constantly that as they were living it, it was day to day. They had no perspective, right? They didn't know what was going on at the time. So no, I didn't run into any of that sort of like, okay, I'm going to tell you this story off the record type thing, which I'm pretty grateful for.
Yeah. And so much of Maus also is about the way that that brutality, the dehumanization can fray the bonds of family and fray the bonds of friendship when everyone's just kind of in survival mode. So it was interesting to me because your books are so much about the bonds of family and friendship. Just curious what you make of that.
You know, I feel like friendship and family, yeah, absolutely, they're at the core of both of the stories and the love, I think that's a really strong theme. And I think for me, those themes sort of bubbled naturally to the surface as I thought about what would I have done if I were in the shoes of my relatives or in Lili's shoes in One Good Thing. And I imagine that I would have tried everything in my power to retain some sense of normalcy and whether that, you know, for my family, that was my grandfather kept making music and there were new romances, there were babies being born. So despite these horrors unfolding around them, they kept living. They kept putting one foot in front of the other.
And I'll never know why for certain, but I did imagine if it were me, I think sort of holding on to those things that inspire me and fuel me, which are family and friends and love and children from music for my grandfather would have been sort of imperative in surviving, right? So I don't know, I think about it, I think about it a lot and I think about, for Lili and for my family, like how do you survive and how do you resist? Like is your form of resistance going into hiding or is it picking up a rifle and going out into the woods and fighting with the partisans or is it taking on a different identity and pretending to be someone else? So they were sort of doing these heroic things in a way that were portrayed very quietly and also in another way, do you know what I mean?
And I'm fascinated by that. Like both my stories, I think, capture quite ordinary people, right? Like ordinary family, ordinary young woman, suddenly forced with this extraordinary time to make decisions that are sliding door moments that could be life or death, depending on the outcome. And so I ask myself constantly, how would I have answered those questions? What would I have done? And my goal as a writer is hopefully to have some readers ask themselves the same questions.
Book Two: A Jewish Book from Adulthood — Send for Me by Lauren Fox.
I love Lauren Fox, she's an amazing human and beautiful, beautiful writer. And this story was also based on her grandmother's Holocaust story. And I remember talking to her and she had discovered this, like, box of letters that her, I think it was her great-grandmother was writing to her grandmother. So her great-grandmother was stuck in Germany and her grandmother Kate was able to get out.
And so the letters that they wrote back and forth, she discovered them, and I think for a while thought she might write a memoir and it just, it didn't work. So she put them, put the letters away. And, um, and then I think I remember her saying it was like 2016 when history started to feel like it was repeating itself. We started to see a rise in Holocaust deniers and antisemitism.
And she, she went back to those letters and she realized that she could try to tell her family story through historical fiction in a way that still honored it and did it justice. And she did just that. Like it's just so beautifully told. Once again, I feel like there's some parallels with my family story and that the thread throughout is family and love. It's so emotionally rich and she peppers in the letters throughout. So it's like these real letters that — which is just like achingly beautiful and haunting at the same time. But she really makes you feel like you're not looking back at history, but just living it right there alongside her relatives. So I highly recommend it. And it was, and it was influential, I mean, just like, just, I could relate so deeply to it.
Both Maus and Send for Me have the two alternating timelines of the story during the Holocaust, and I wondered if that was something that spoke to you in particular.
You know, interestingly, I had thought about doing that with both of my books, actually. I'm always tempted because I feel like part of my narrative is being the third generation survivor, retelling or imagining the story, right, of what happened. And I did think long and hard about whether to incorporate my, my journey of unearthing it, in We Were the Lucky Ones at least. I actually had, early stages of One Good Thing had a modern day narrator as well.
She didn’t make the final edit though. And I feel like part of that decision was that in the end, I think what I like to try to do is tell a story that makes people feel like they're there in the moment. And that, like, really removes any dust or sepia tones or any sense of looking back and makes you feel like you're living it in color, like alongside the characters. So for me, that meant just placing readers in that world and not bumping them out of it.
And then I personally kept a very in-depth blog while I was doing my research, really to keep the family abreast of what I was learning and where I was going. Like I said, we're very global, so I just wanted to make sure they were feeling, like, up to date on the travels. They were also interested. So if you go to my website, I have a blog that dates way back to 2008 and I highlight my research findings and not, not just that, but like what it meant to me, like what it meant to me to discover that my great uncle Genick, who was sent to Siberia, had written like a nine page document by hand, somehow that was recorded and kept at the Hoover Institution in Stanford University. And so was able to like find that, translate it, and in that document, his story was always really vague. Like it was just Siberia, the Gulag, that's all we knew. And one of his sons was born there. And that was like the extent of what we knew. But in this document, it shared everything. Like the day he was arrested, he and his wife shipped out on a train, the 45 day journey, the name of the town, what they were forced to do, the day his son was born, like all the details that you read in the book. And so I didn't share all of that on the blog, but to be able to post the picture of the document and then his children actually took that document and wrote a piece of music to it, composed a piece for piano to it, and now they do readings in Brazil.
So like, you know, talking about that and how there are different pieces of history that live on in all these very different ways. So that was my little attempt at bringing my second storyline into my family's story.
It's so beautiful. I was blown away really by the extent to which you researched and the fact that you could tell the story of five different siblings and their parents and know each of their stories is pretty remarkable. I mean, that's the We Were the Lucky Ones, right?
Thank you. For me, it was very grounding. I think I unearthed this part of my DNA that I didn't know existed. And then the process of unearthing it sort of shifted that DNA in a way, if you will. It brought me closer to my roots and to my family and to understanding this thing that shaped us. And, you know, and not only like understanding this remarkable story of how the family survived, but then what they did with their lives afterwards and how they told their stories, how they relayed them to their children and their grandchildren. And I think it was so interesting to me that so many of the stories that were passed down were done so with levity and laughter and anecdotally. And I'm sure part of that was to protect, right? So they didn't — themselves from reliving the darkest details, but also to protect me.
Of course, when it came time to write those scenes, I had to kind of reimagine what it was actually like to be in that moment. Like I remember hearing the story of Adam, my great aunt Helena's husband, and how he was accused of being Jewish at one point, they're living with their false IDs, and he dropped his trousers to prove that he was uncircumcised. And that story was told with so much laughter. And then I realized in that moment, there was nothing funny about that moment, right? And so I tried to depict both, but I also, I don't know, I think it's just very telling that this family somehow came out of this. And I think this is partly a Jewish trait with love and laughter in their hearts. I think it's remarkable. And I'm so inspired by that. Like when life gets hard for me, you know, like, it's easier for me now to kind of see the bigger picture and put things into perspective than it was before.
Book Three: A Book That Changed Your Worldview — James by Percival Everett.
It's unlike anything I've read in a very long time. So it's a reimagining of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but told from the perspective of Huck's friend on his travels, Jim, who's an escaped slave. So to me, it was this just brilliant way of flipping the script and of taking this cultural landmark that — this book that we all read as kids and telling it through an entirely different lens. I don't know, the way he was able to capture James's voice, many voices, the voices he puts on for the white people and the voices he puts on for his fellow slaves. It carries so much soul. It is, I don't know, it's a story really at its core about humanity and, you know, how we see the people who are opposite us.
And I think, you know, similar to We Were the Lucky Ones and to One Good Thing, you know, my goal was to put my readers in the hearts and minds of, of my characters/relatives. And that's certainly what you do with James. And in doing so you are brought understanding and with understanding, I believe comes empathy. So I feel like it's just a wonderful example of this book that's going to kind of shift perspectives and bring empathy, which it just feels like the world needs a bit more empathy right now. So I loved it for so many reasons.
Yeah, no, I do note that all of the books you mention are related to racism and bigotry and family separation.
Yeah, and told through just such human lenses, like I think in ways that you can relate. I think a lot about how to reach, how important it is right now to reach younger audiences, younger readers, and unless they can relate, nothing's gonna, like, sink in, nothing's gonna settle into their hearts, their minds. So I hope that's always a goal with my writing and certainly with James, I think this should be like required reading in schools. It's wonderful.
Book 4: The Book You're Reading Now — The Lost Baker of Vienna by Sharon Kurtzman.
So I am reading an early galley. So this book is coming out, I think in May of this year, called The Lost Baker of Vienna by Sharon Kurtzman. Again, a story inspired by the author's own family. And so I clearly am drawn to these types of stories. But what's really interesting to me about this one in particular is that it's set after the Holocaust, sort of in that rebuilding phase, and trying to figure out where to go next. And I think that's just not a part of history that we dive into that often. Usually the story takes place during the war. Long story short, it ends up being a love story in a way because, and a love triangle actually, as she gets to know a young apprentice at the restaurant who's also baking and they, like, sneak out at night to, meeting at the restaurant to bake together. And then the other love interest is a black market dealer. I just thought it was so interesting to not just kind of bring that stage of post-war reality to life, but once again, to tell it through the eyes of this young woman who's living in this world where there are love triangles, you know, and there are romances and there's so much danger around every corner still. It was eye-opening. It is eye-opening to me like how unsafe it was to be Jewish in Europe. I remember my family saying the same thing and it played a part of their decision to not return to Poland after the war. They didn't feel safe there and rightfully so. So it's really well written. It's a beautiful sort of a, feels like it's going to be this, like, sweeping saga about, you know, survival and, and loss and love and these reverberating effects of the war and how amidst, again, amidst all the chaos and the darkness, people are finding ways to rebuild and to keep living.
Book 5: The Author's Latest Book — One Good Thing by Georgia Hunter.
Did it feel obvious to you to return to telling a Holocaust story?
It did. Full disclosure, when We Were the Lucky Ones came out, I had my second child a few days after my book tour ended. So I took a pause and caught my breath. And then when my editor at Penguin called and said, okay, what's next? I was really taken aback because I hadn't thought about what was next. To be honest, like, I had thought of myself as the granddaughter and the family historian. And this was my passion project. It took me nine years to do this.
I just hadn't wrapped my head around the fact that now I was an author. So I thought long and hard from that question of what's next, because I realized that whatever I dove into as a writer, you just put so much of your energy and your heart and your headspace. So it's important for me to choose the right place to put all that energy. And my head and my heart kept bringing me back to Europe and to World War II and to the untold stories of the Holocaust. So yeah, it felt very, it felt very natural to return there for the second round.
And what was it like to tell a fictional story as opposed to your family history?
Yeah, it was really, it was equal parts exciting, like freeing. Like I had the option to create plot and characters, which I mean, for the first one, it was like, I didn't change a thing. Like my whole purpose was to tell the family story as truthfully, as authentically as I could. Yeah, but so I had that creative license with One Good Thing. So it was equal parts exciting and also a little terrifying because it was, again, new to me. I hadn't.. hadn't written a book like that before where I had that creative license. And I ended up having a lot of fun with it. I thought the process would feel entirely different, being that the first project was so personal, but looking back, it was different in many ways — it's set in Italy, my research findings were different, there's one narrator as opposed to storylines woven together throughout, which made my life a whole lot easier — but there were so many parallels and that came really in the research part where I kept coming across people and events in the Italian story that fascinated me and that I wove into, Lili is my main character, I wove into her account and it was the same and We Were the Lucky Ones. you know, they would tell their story and then I would research the events around it. So it was just a little bit, you know, backwards. I did it in opposite directions, but in this case, I researched the history and picked the events and the people and the places that really stood out to me as interesting or eye-opening in some way, and then tried to figure out how to weave my narrator's journey into those stories. There were some parallels that surprised me.
That's so interesting. The story is rooted in the friendship between Lili and Esti and their friendship is really remarkable and such a beautiful relationship to read about. I was wondering if there was a friendship in your life or that you encountered that inspired that.
Yeah, I was going to say that was the second part of the process of writing the story that felt familiar in that for We Were the Lucky Ones I was drawing from real people, right? Even though I didn't have a chance to meet many of those first-generation survivors, I mentioned earlier, I felt like I came to know them through their children and bringing their characters to life was a real joy. And in this case, I drew all of my main characters from people I know and love and the friendship especially. And I won't say there's a single friend. I have a group of five or six girls, women, in my life who I would do anything for and they would do anything for me. And we lean on each other in the good times and the bad. And I don't know what I'd do without them. And so that was a really powerful bond to sort of draw from as I painted that friendship between Lili and Esti. And then I have two little boys at home. So there's a little boy, Theo, in the story. And I built him around my, sort of a mix of my two boys and on and on, there's a character based on my husband and one of my father. And I see a lot of myself in Lili and a lot of my great aunt Helena in Esti. So right now —
I see that.
You see that?
Yeah. Now that you say that, Yeah. Beautiful. I just am thinking about what we were talking about earlier. You were talking about all the different forms of resistance and that for Lili, kindness is really her form of resistance. You know, she's scared in many ways as she takes each next step getting involved in the resistance. And I don't want to give too much away, but her relationship with Theo changes, and then they meet an American soldier named Thomas, so each of those kind of decisions, she steps into a little reluctantly, right? But it's that kindness that — even in the face of everything that's trying to erode kindness — that really defines her choices.
I love that. Yeah.
Yeah. I was wondering, I think what's horrifying to me right now is the way that people seem to feel that empathy is finite, that you have to only, you know, only mourn for the children of a particular set of people. I was wondering if it felt different to you to publish this book now than when you published We Were the Lucky Ones.
Yeah, certainly does. I mean, I never would have imagined in 2008 when I set out to research my family's story that upon publication in 2017, that that story would feel so relevant. And now here we are and it's even more relevant than ever. And we, you know, we thought about it a lot with the launch of the series too, which just came out last year. And we thought about postponing it and we said, no, like there's no more important time than now to tell these stories. I don't know. I think a lot of times, you know, polarization or even generally racism, antisemitism, hate can be fueled by lack of knowledge. And when you are presented a story once again through a human lens, you're allowed to not only learn, I mean, it's so scary how few young people today even know about the Holocaust. Like those, the statistics are alarming, right? Like let alone the rise in antisemitism and Holocaust deniers, like it's insane sort of the way the world feels like it's going backwards. But the more we can share stories through that human lens, I think we can do two things. We can learn about a time in history that's starting to feel ancient, especially to younger generations. And hopefully we can build some of that empathy that you're talking about by connecting, by relating. I never make it my purpose, and I never will, I think, in my work to make a big point or try to prove something or be political about anything. But I do think people will take away, well, take away what they will from both of my books. But certainly, I feel more driven now than ever to get these stories out and to share them. And I'm so, so lucky to have an amazing publisher, an amazing team to help get them into the hands of readers. And I love that the series is out now because that's another way to reach especially young audiences who've grown up with some of these actors in there on their televisions for years now, Joey King and Logan Lerman, I mean, they've been acting since they were little kids and now they're stepping into roles of my relatives who were young adults at the start of Holocaust. So for people to be able to relate in that way, in a new way, in a visual medium is really exciting to me too. And I've gotten so much wonderful feedback. I love it when, especially when I hear, “I watched it with my daughter, my middle school age daughter or my college age daughter or son. We watched it as a family.” That's like the best, the best thing I can ever hear. the other thing that it sort of inspires me right now is I'm getting asked more and more to speak at schools. And that to me is like, I could just do that for the rest of my life and sit and talk with students about this discovery that I made when I was their age in high school and I interviewed my grandmother and it sparked this interest and turned into this thing. So yes, I am more passionate now than ever in trying to find different ways to keep these stories alive.
And we all are benefiting from that, so thank you. I just, on a different note slightly, but I was curious. Nico and Esti are both Greek Jews, I believe one of them is from Rhodes. And I know that you thanked or acknowledged Stella Levy in the acknowledgments and her book that she did with Michael Frank, or Michael Frank's book, 100 Saturdays, is really one of my favorite books. So I love that you included that. I'm wondering why you wanted to make those connections and include the Greek story a little bit.
It's actually another personal story. So I think it was 2011, my husband and my father-in-law and I took a trip to Greece and we ended up on Rhodes on this tiny island, walking in the back streets and we stumbled upon a synagogue and there was a gentleman inside and he showed us around and it was, I think it's one of the oldest synagogues in Greece.And he started telling me the history. And I just remember thinking, wow, like, wow, this tiny island in the middle of the Greek Isles has this incredible history. And then, yeah, I think that's what sparked the interest in weaving it into Lili's story.
And certainly Stella, I remember reading her story, reading an article about her in the Times, I think, first, and then she was speaking in New York. So I went and I heard her speak. And she was telling these incredible stories about growing up as this little girl on the island and her cork-soled sandals and playing on the beach and diving off of the rocks. And it just seemed like something, Esti, it just fit her personality so well to have grown up like a wild child running around the streets of Rhodes, so I don't know. Yeah, between the two, I was just really inspired. And, you know, Greeks, the history of the Holocaust in Greece is another one that's I think not as understood as, you know, what was happening in Eastern Europe. So it was my chance to tell a little bit of that story as well.
Yeah. And again, I don't want to say too much, but there are characters that at the end of the book, you don't know what happened to them. And the reader doesn't ever find out. And I wondered about that choice.
Yeah, I think that was...That was a departure for me as far as like, when I first set out to write. So this was another sort of difference in the process between We Were the Lucky Ones and One Good Thing in that I knew exactly how We Were the Lucky Ones was going to end, right? There was no changing the story. Whereas with Lili's story, I was free to sort of run with it and see where it went. And I think part of the Holocaust story, part of that narrative, is the uncertainty and the not knowing. And so many people were left not knowing exactly what happened to their family members or having to wait for years to find out. My family was a complete statistical anomaly. So in a sense, I think I leaned toward my ending as a way to honor sort of the more common experience of a survivor. Usually, you know, if it was just one or two from a family, chances are you weren't gonna know for certain what exactly happened to your relatives or maybe, maybe it would take you some years to figure it out. But yeah, that was a choice that kind of came together naturally as I wrote.
I found it very poignant and to your point, you know, as a reader, you're like, wait, I don't know what happened. And then you feel like, well, that's true. That's true to the experience of it. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you about was the role of the church during the Holocaust, which plays a big role in Lili's story. And, you know, it's rife with contradictions. And the church is really what saves her in many — at many points in the story, and there are also points where that becomes very dangerous to her. So tell me a little bit about why you chose to tell this part of the story.
Yeah, I think it's so fascinating how it's still debated today, the role of the church and of the Italian people. And up until I think like the late eighties, there was this general perception that everybody in Italy was a savior. So it's called, like, “the myth of the good Italian.” They talk about it that way now. And then little by little, the reality of what was happening in Italy at the time has surfaced, including recently, like new transcripts from the pope have been released. So there's been a lot of discussion, still is, ongoing, I'm sure there will be for years, around it. There's a lot of confusion around it and people disagree. So I tried my best to make sense of it all. Like you said, I think that absolutely there were many people in the church who helped. There were also some who didn't. There's a lot of question about the role of the pope and could he have helped more Jews?
And I tried to make those questions very much a part of Lili's worldview, right? Like, so I was trying, I tried very hard not to lead her in one direction or another, but to kind of show multiple sides of that story through her experience, because I think that was the reality. I think there were people on the street who turned, you know, a blind eye and there were people on the street who would help, there were priests who would turn you in and there were priests who would help you find a false ID. So I found it so interesting to try to tell both sides of that story and also to kind of bring to life the slow but sort of shocking realization from the perspective of an Italian Jew that they're not necessarily safe in Italy under the eye of the Vatican, right? Like, I think that played a role in the decision many made in not leaving sooner, not taking on an Aryan ID, not trying to flee to Switzerland. So like, “what could possibly happen? You know, we have the Pope, you know, we'll never see the sort of persecution that Eastern European is experiencing,” but turns out that wasn't the case.
Yep. Right, well, as I said, I think that the story, its biggest takeaway for me was really about kindness and the way that the people, the helpers, you know, the people who helped her and the way that she was able to make her way through in so many harrowing situations through the goodness and kindness of others. So I hope that people will read it and take that away from it as well. And I'm so glad that you decided to tell this story. So thank you for sharing it with us today.
Thank you, I love that, it makes me so happy to hear that that was your takeaway. So I appreciate you saying that and I appreciate you having me on. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. Our guest today was Georgia Hunter, discussing her new novel, One Good Thing. You can find a link to the book and all the others Georgia discussed in our show notes. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family and rate and review in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can also now find us online at www.fivebookspod.org.
You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team@fivebookspod.org and you can find us on Instagram @fivebookspod. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin editorial and website support from Sarah Waring music by Dov Rosenblatt and blue dot sessions art by Dina Friedman. Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
