David Wright Faladé didn’t learn the truth about his lineage until he was 16. That’s when his mother told him that his biological father was a West African student she initially met in post-war Paris, as she grappled with the trauma of her Jewish family surviving the Holocaust. It was a shock to a mixed-race boy growing up in the panhandle of Texas, playing football and drinking Slurpee’s in 1970s America.

But the surprises didn’t stop there. When Wright Faladé eventually moved to France and met his father, he discovered a connection to Dahomey royalty and a past complicated by the slave trade and colonialism.

• 
  
  From 2022 David Wright Faladé on the all-Black brigade that inspired his new historical novel
  
  

This made-for-TV personal history inspired his new novel, “The New Internationals,” which details the love triangle formed by a Holocaust survivor, a Sorbonne student from colonial West Africa and a Black GI from America. This week, he joined Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas to share even more of his family’s history and discuss how the potent mix of grief, guilt and hope found in post-war Europe created the world as we know it today.

Guest:

• David Wright Faladé is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Illinois and the author of several books, including “Black Cloud Rising.” His just-released novel is “The New Internationals.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.