The Missing Piece: Hidden Soviet Jewish Stories

Daniela Gerson is an award-winning reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Public Radio International, and the Financial Times, among other outlets. An associate professor of journalism at California State University, Northridge and editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square, she previously worked as a community engagement editor at the LA Times and as a staff immigration reporter for the New York Sun. She has also directed programs at the intersection of civic engagement and news representation for the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School and the City University of New York’s Newmark School.

Daniela co-founded Migratory Notes, an immigration newsletter, and spent more than a year reporting from Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Scholar and an Arthur F. Burns Fellow. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Southern California, she speaks Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Hebrew. Daniela lives in Los Angeles with her two children and her wife, an attorney specializing in immigrants’ rights.

Photo by Kait Lavo

The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II

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.

Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury), winner of the California Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It has been translated into seven languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Telegraph, KQED, and elsewhere. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and New York University. 

Masha Rumer is the author of Parenting with an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children (Beacon Press), winner of the 2023 Sarton Award for Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, LA Review of Books, Newsweek, and elsewhere, winning awards from the New York Press Association. She was born in the former Soviet Union and is currently working on her first novel.

Photo by Laura Turbow