23Jul
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how stories come to us. Sometimes, they arrive fully told, from prologue to The End, in one complete waterfall. Sometimes they reach out to us hesitantly, in little pieces…a photograph, a memory, a question…. breadcrumbs put on our path, but it’s up to us to notice them.
My forthcoming novel,The Shopkeeper of Alsace, came to me in breadcrumbs. The first dropped before me in the mid-1980s, when I was an exchange student in Strasbourg, France. That’s the capital of Alsace, an eastern province right on the Rhine River and the German border.
Source: ©️ Creative Commons
Through the exchange program, I became friends with a woman from Colmar named Annette, who was about my mother’s age. One day, Annette made a single, casual comment when we were probably just hanging out in her kitchen. She said:
"I was hidden at a convent during the war."
Annette was just a little girl when World War Two was declared in September of 1939. By 1942, thousands of Jewish families like Annette’s were being deported to Nazi death camps, and desperate parents chose to hide their children wherever they could, with whomever was willing. (Here's Annette on her mother's shoulders, probably around age 3 or 4)
(Photo: Courtesy of Brigitte Aumont)
I’d studied WWII in high school and college, and was aware of its horrors. Still, when Annette mentioned her experience, for some reason, I didn’t ask more questions. Maybe I hesitated because I wasn’t sure how much she wanted to share - it was, after all, serious childhood trauma. Or maybe I was just a self-absorbed 20-year-old college student. To this day, I can’t explain it, but at that moment, I didn’t probe, and she didn’t offer any more information.
Over the years, however, my study of history deepened, and my friend’s comment and the gigantic story behind it began poking more at my curiosity. Still, life intervened. I finished college, built a successful career in journalism, got married, and had children. Annette and I stayed in touch for 30 years, through letters and occasional visits. We remained close, despite the Atlantic Ocean between us. She even came to my wedding in 1995.
When my older son was 13, I took him to France. Of course, we went to Strasbourg to stay with Annette. At breakfast one day, more tales came out about the war, including the resistance activities of Annette’s two older brothers, Jacques and Andre. At that point, I’d been a journalist for more than 20 years, and my desire to know more about my friend's story intensified.
But that was my last visit with Annette; she died in 2015. In addition to grief over the loss, I was frustrated with myself: I was a talk show host, for heaven’s sake. I should have done with my friend what I did every single day on the radio: Tell me more, Annette, I should have said. Tell me more about that. What happened? How did you feel?
In early 2018, I got together with Annette’s daughter Brigitte, when she was in New York City for vacation. I lamented how I had always wanted to write about her mother’s story…but that now it was too late. Then Brigitte replied:
But there’s still my uncle Jacques...and he remembers everything...
And so it began: three years of research, interviews, and writing. (And three more years of revising, while trying to find a publisher. More on that in a future post!) One key source of information was the family’s personal saga, recorded on a series of cassettes in May of 2005 by Annette and her brothers. I listened to it a dozen times, scratching out pages of notes. A transcript from Brigitte was hugely helpful for the few French place names I didn’t understand. Brigitte and her cousin Martine, Jacques' daughter, also arranged for me to interview Jacques in November 2018. Here we are, with Jacques still sharp at age 95. (He died four years later, in 2022.)
(Photo: Martine Seibert)
At this point, a heroine emerged: the family matriarch, Sarah. She's not the type of heroine we often meet in WWII novels: she wasn't a spy, a resistance leader, a lady pilot, a code-breaker. She was a successful businesswoman, a mother, a wife, a devoted sister. She was opinionated and bossy, with an enormous, generous heart. And she had a superpower: an uncanny ability to smell trouble before anyone else…and the courage to take action when she smelled it.
(Photo: Sarah and husband Max, 1939. Courtesy of Brigitte Aumont)
I can’t wait to share her story with you in The Shopkeeper of Alsace. Publication Date November 7th! Meanwhile, sign up for my newsletter for updates like when you can pre-order the novel, launch dates, book signings, and cover reveals.
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