If you were one of the gazillions of people who loved reading Curious George books as a kid, you may have wondered “why the monkey hero of the ‘Curious George’ children’s books is so fond of travel, so prone to mischief, yet always narrowly escapes disaster?” According to this Associated Press wire story by Ann Levin, “A new exhibit at New York’s Jewish Museum suggests that curious readers need look no farther than the real-life adventures of the intrepid husband-and-wife team who created the beloved character.”

As it turns out, the co-authors were often on the run themselves:

H.A. and Margret Rey — he changed the name from Reyersbach — were German Jews living in Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, increasingly concerned about finding safe haven. Two days before the Germans marched into Paris, they fled on bicycles carrying drawings for their picture books, including one about a mischievous monkey then called Fifi.

The Jewish Museum exhibit covers both “the harrowing conditions they endured on their four-month flight in 1940 from France to New York,” as well as their “unusually long and fertile artistic collaboration,” which resulted in 30 books and travels that took them from studying at the famed Bauhaus School in Germany, to an apartment in Brazil with their pet marmosets, and finally to New York.

And of course it also tells how George was developed:

The idea for George began in an earlier book about a lonely giraffe named Raffy who befriends nine monkeys, the youngest of which is called Fifi. Eventually, the Reys decided to develop a story just about Fifi. It was one of the stories they smuggled out of France, only to learn when they got to the U.S. that American publisher Houghton Mifflin had doubts about the name Fifi for a boy monkey.

And so Fifi became George in the United States — and Zozo in Britain. With George VI then king of England, it seemed disrespectful for a monkey to have the same name as the British sovereign.

If you’re in New York and curious, the show is up until August 1st.