How My Grandmother Inspired My Writing

Growing up, I was very close to my grandmother. Some of my earliest memories are of the Friday nights we spent at my grandparents’ home for Shabbat dinner, the Jewish sabbath. This was a weekly tradition. We lit the candles and said the prayers over the wine and challah. Our dinners consisted of a four-course meal that always started with bagels and her famous matzo ball soup, followed by egg salad, roasted chicken and potatoes, and ending with tzimmes, a dessert of stewed fruit.

No family event was ever complete without a tableful of food and, we always left with a full stomach.  

On those evenings, my grandmother never sat down. I liked to follow her around the kitchen, listening to her talk as she worked. She spoke in a thick European accent, but I never had trouble understanding her. She was my bubbe, and her voice was as familiar to me as my own.

I don’t know when I realized that she and my grandfather were from another country. I also don’t remember when I realized they had survived the Holocaust. It was something I just always knew.  

It wasn’t until I was much older and in school that I understood the significance of the Holocaust, both historically and on a personal level.  For me, this moment in history wasn’t just a blurb on the pages of a textbook . . . it was something my family had witnessed firsthand. By that time, I had seen for myself the psychological toll being a survivor had taken on my grandmother, particularly after my grandfather passed away.  

I became even closer to my grandmother as I grew older, especially in my late teens and twenties. Since my grandmother didn’t drive, I would often take her to lunch or the grocery store or the mall. We would spend afternoons in her home watching Fiddler on the Roof and Crossing Delancey, or cooking in her small kitchen. 

It was during one of those afternoons that my grandmother first told me about her childhood. I had always been interested in her past, but that afternoon and the ones that followed were when I truly got a glimpse into what life had been like for her as a young girl growing up in a small town in Poland.

I think of my grandmother’s kitchen, of sitting at her bistro table sipping warm tea, when I remember those afternoons. I think of the soft couch where I would sink into the cushions when I remember those conversations. But most of all, I remember the faraway look in her eyes.  

It was also around this time that I was focusing on my career as a writer. As early as the 7th-grade, I had discovered my passion for writing.  Words were an escape for me. I was an avid reader and loved discovering new worlds in the pages of books. I also felt the process of writing was very cathartic. In my twenties, I wrote a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but as my grandmother’s past was slowly revealed to me, I knew exactly what I wanted my first book to be about.  I wanted to write my grandmother’s story.

With that in mind, I brought my 8 MM camera to my grandmother’s home one afternoon. We sat next to each other on her couch and I began to interview her. She showed me photographs on her wall, talking about family members I knew, and some I didn’t. She told me about her mother and father. She told me about the town where she grew up. She shared some of the memories of her time in the concentration camps. She exposed secrets she had never told anyone before.  

The interview lasted an hour-and-a-half, but I soon forgot about the time. I forgot where I was. I was transported to her home in Olkusz, Poland. I could hear the echo of laughter in her family’s home, could see the cobblestoned streets of the town square, and smell the freshly baked bread from her father’s bakery.

I was mesmerized. It was the most she’d ever opened up to me. That interview became the basis for the novel I knew I would write. It was that afternoon that What She Lost was born.  

Now I knew what I wanted to write, but I soon realized I didn’t know how to write it. I wanted to be as faithful to my grandmother’s account as possible, but every time I started writing, the words didn’t feel genuine. I attempted many times to put words on paper, but nothing rang true. I even tried writing the narrative as a series of short stories and, at one time, a screenplay.

Then life got in the way. My husband and I had two wonderful daughters and I devoted myself to being a full-time mom. I wrote when I could, but those moments were fleeting. I had to fit them in between diaper changes and late-night feedings, and later, carpool runs and PTA meetings. Twenty years flew by in the blink of an eye.

With my girls now grown, I revisited all the pages I had written in the past, all the notes I had jotted down over the years, all the different attempts I had made to tell my grandmother’s story. With more time on my hands, I was ready to dive in again. I devoted myself once more to telling her story. And by some miracle, it worked. I found the right voice.

It took me becoming a mom to truly put myself not just in my grandmother’s shoes, but those of her entire family. I tried to imagine how I would feel if these events were happening today (and unfortunately, in recent years, that’s not a hard thing to do). I tried to imagine what it would feel like to watch my family be torn apart, to see the security and safety of home be stripped away. Only by becoming a mother do I think I was able to do this story justice.  

When asked how long it took me to write this book, I always give two answers. The first is that it took two to three years from my first draft to publication. But the second and more accurate answer is that it took me almost twenty years and many, many attempts before I got it right.  And while What She Lost is fictionalized events of what my grandmother experienced, the characters are as real to me as the people they were based on.  

—

Melissa W. Hunter, author of What She Lost and other works, is a writer and blogger from Cincinnati, Ohio. She studied creative writing and journalism at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a BA in English literature and a minor in Judaic studies.

She was awarded the English Department’s Undergraduate Essay Award and Undergraduate Fiction Award over two consecutive years. In her senior year, she received a grant to study and write about the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

Her articles have been published on Kveller.com and LiteraryMama.com, and her short stories have appeared in the Jewish Literary Journal. She is a contributing blogger to the Today Show parenting community, and her novella Through a Mirror Clear was published as a serial installment on TheSame.blog, an online literary journal written for women by women.

It is available in its entirety on Amazon.com. Her novel What She Lost is inspired by her grandmother’s life as a Holocaust survivor.  When not writing, Melissa loves spending family time with her husband and two beautiful daughters.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/authormelissa

Find out more about her on her website https://www.melissawhunter.com/

WHAT SHE LOST

For thirteen-year-old Sarah Waldman, life in the small Polish town of Olkusz is idyllic, grounded in her loving, close-knit family and the traditions of their Jewish faith. But in 1939, as the Nazis come to power, a storm is gathering-a relentless, unforgiving storm that will sweep Sarah and her family into years of misery in the ghetto and concentration camps, tearing them apart.

Will Sarah’s strong will and determination be enough for her to survive when everything she loves is taken from her? Is it possible to resurrect a life-and find love-from the ruins?

Or will Sarah be forever haunted by the memories of what she lost? Part memoir, part fiction, What She Lost is the reimagined true-life story of the author’s grandmother growing into a woman amid the anguish of the Holocaust. It is a tale of resilience, of rebuilding a life, and of rediscovering love.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing