Description: "Powerful." -- Wall Street Journal
An immigration journalist and her wife trace their family's intertwined past to unearth a history of how hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived Hitler's Holocaust at the brutal hands of Stalin--a story that sheds light on the enduring power of hope and love. Daniela Gerson and her wife, Talia Inlender, met at a picnic in Los Angeles, not knowing that 75 years earlier, their grandparents had left homes only blocks away from each other in a small Polish town, and fled east to Ukraine. The Gersons and the Inlenders would go on parallel odysseys of 5,000 miles to survive the Holocaust--journeys that would, after a deceitful loyalty test from Stalin, put them on cattle cars to a Soviet Gulag, trap them for years in limbo in Central Asia, and would end, after a decade on the run, with new lives built on secrets and lies. For years, Daniela and Talia simply accepted this painful shared history as a sign that they were b'shert, meant to be. Their families' refugee past fueled their work: Daniela as an immigration journalist; Talia an immigration attorney. But as Daniela uncovered more, she realized that their grandparents shared this escape path in the Soviet Union with most Polish Jews who survived; a group--sometimes collectively called "the Wanderers"--that is almost entirely absent from popular understanding of World War II. And unlike most Holocaust sagas that focus on the exceptionality of the Nazi genocide, theirs was also a universal story of refugees making impossible decisions when forced to seek safety, protect their children, and find new homes. This is a story that, to the dismay of the world, remains relevant each time a political upheaval wreaks havoc on individual lives. Part genealogical detective story, part gripping history, part contemporary reporting on war-torn territories, The Wanderers chronicles Daniela's journey to unearth this past with her wife, and reveal its echoes in still-contested lands from Ukraine to Israel. The Wanderers is a groundbreaking narrative history, and a meditation on how a home left behind and a desperate journey to survive reverberates across borders and through generations.Review Quotes: "Traveling to Poland and Ukraine, Tel Aviv and Tashkent, Daniela pursues the details of their intertwined family stories. She sifts through name changes, blurred documents, and lies told in order to survive. As she pursues these stories of the war of the past, she finds herself entering two wars of the present--in Ukraine, and in Gaza. Self-reflective, committed to truth-telling, and painfully aware that victimhood does not imply innocence, the author takes the reader on an enthralling journey through multiple hells and layer upon layer of tragedy for more than one people."
--Marci Shore, author of The Ukrainian Night and The Taste of Ashes