Harlan Elliott is born in Macon, Georgia, during the Great Migration and raised toward the music that carries him to Harlem cabarets, to Paris and the Montmartre jazz world alongside his friend, the trumpeter Lizard Rubinstein — and then, caught in occupied Europe, into imprisonment at Buchenwald. McFadden drew in part on her own grandfather's life in shaping Harlan's passage from American racism to the European catastrophe and back.
Author: Bernice L. McFadden · Original publisher: Akashic Books (New York), 2016
