Finding Your Roots and Writing About Them
When Georgia Hunter was 15, she learned that her grandfather and his entire family of 22 people were Holocaust survivors. Her first book We Were the Lucky Ones is about their journey to escape the Nazis. Hunter spent years doing extensive research including interviews with many members of her family. The book has been made into a series on ‘Hulu’.
One Good Thing is a book she wrote after her editor, who was excited about her best seller, called her and asked when she would have another book ready! This time she decided to set the story in Italy because her parents lived in Italy for almost 20 years. Of course, she needed to do more research about the Holocaust in Italy, which was different from Eastern Europe but certainly no less gruesome. The new book is fiction wheras We Were the Lucky Ones is not. In One Good Thing, the main characters are best friends who flee from Nazi occupied Italy in order to save a group of orphans. For a while they pose as nuns in a convent before they have to go on the run again. The book is exciting and endearing–a tribute to the courage and sacrifice of so many people during this time in history.
David Levering Lewis is a Pulitzer Prize winning author who is Professor emeritus of history at New York University. It is hard to over-emphasize Lewis’ scholarly accomplishments and the importance of the books he has written. It took him almost 75 years and a stained glass window, however, for him to decide to write a book about his own family history from 1790 to 1958. The stained glass window resides in an Atlanta church and depicts a likeness of his grandmother Alice King Bell. Gazing upon that window, Lewis said he realized it was time for him “to find myself in a past I barely knew.” The result is an important book that is both a family chronicle and a personal memoir.
Since research was second nature to Lewis, he was able to first discover his great-grandmother Clarissa King. From there he pieced together four families, two white, one enslaved black and one free black. He had a complex heritage that is both interesting and enticing. On March 5, 2025, Michael Henry Adams, book reviewer for the The York Amsterdam News, commented on the duality of the story by stating, “The Stained Glass Window encapsulates America’s original sin of slaughter and enslavement, in all its perversity and contraditions, and in its redemptive majesty, too.”
