Winter 2026

It seemed b’shert when Daniela Gerson, an immigration journalist, met the woman she’d marry, Talia Inlender, at a picnic in Los Angeles.

Seventy-five years earlier, their grandparents had left homes only blocks away from each other in a small Polish town and fled east to Ukraine on parallel odysseys of 5,000 miles to survive both the Holocaust and the brutality of Stalin.

But as Daniela uncovered more about their grandparents, she discovered that their escape path across the Soviet Union was shared with many Polish Jews who survived, “the Wanderers,” as they were called, who are almost entirely absent from the popular understanding of World War II.

To her, theirs became a universal story of refugees making impossible decisions when forced to seek safety, a story that resonates each time a political upheaval wreaks havoc on individual lives.

A groundbreaking narrative history, The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II is part genealogical detective story, part contemporary reporting on war-torn territories and a meditation on how a home left behind reverberates across borders and through generations.

An award-winning reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Public Radio International, and the Financial Times, Daniela Gerson is an associate professor of journalism at California State University, Northridge, and editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square. She previously worked as an editor at the LA Times and an immigration reporter for the New York Sun. She is also cofounder of the immigration newsletter Migratory Notes.