Daniela Gerson, "The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II" (Grand Central Publishing, 2026)
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What inspired Daniela Gerson to write *The Wanderers* and how did the project begin?
Welcome to the new books network. Hello everybody and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Paul Lerner, coming to you from Los Angeles, California. And it's my great pleasure to welcome today's guest, Daniela Gerson. Author of The Wanderers, a story of exile, survival, and unexpected love in the shadow of World War II, which appeared with Grand Central Publishing this past spring. Daniela Gerson is an award-winning reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Dauschpiegel, Public Radio International, and the Financial Times, among many other venues. An associate professor of journalism at Cal State University Northridge and editor at large at Zocolo 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's also directed Programs at the intersection of civic engagement and news representation for USC's Annenberg School and the City University of New York's Newmark School. The Wanderers is a truly extraordinary book, a story which seamlessly and elegantly interweaves the past and the present, a narrative at once deeply personal and of broader, indeed universal relevance. The book recounts Daniela and her wife Talia's indefatigable. search to uncover their family histories. Uncannily, as they discovered soon after meeting, both traced their roots to the same Polish town, Shamosh, and both families escaped the Nazis by fleeing east into the Soviet Union. The book moves back and forth between both the love story and the detective story in the present and the lives and fates of their ancestors in the period of the Holocaust.
A journalist specializing in immigration, whose partner works as an immigration attorney. In her recounting of these narratives, Daniela makes a powerful, unforgettable argument about the refugee experience, all the more relevant in these times of mass migration and restrictive and extremely brutal immigration policies. Daniela, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you on to discuss this wonderful book.
Thank you, Paul. I'm so thrilled to be here.
I usually begin these interviews by giving the author a chance to discuss sort of her origin story of the project, uh, intellectual trajectory and autobiography. Listeners who've read this book will have gotten a lot of that already from the book because it's a very personal book, as I just noted. But I still want to give you a chance to introduce yourself to tell us a little bit about. the project and the story of how it came into being. And I'm going to note before I give you an opportunity to answer this question that um that we know each other pretty well and we're friends. And um I've been hearing about this project and very excited to be, you know, in discussion with you uh s for for quite a quite a while now.
Yeah, it's um well first you have been an amazing source and it's been so good to have someone who's actually an expert in this area because my background is as a journalist and I grew up always hearing these stories. And I actually listeners can't see it, but I have right here a report I wrote in May of nineteen ninety one when I was in um Eighth grade and it's post-World War II East European Jewish immigration to the United States by Daniela Hope Gerson. And this is when I started first to try and document my family's story. And I was really interested in how they had survived in the Soviet Union. It was stories I'd always heard from my family, but like the focus had mostly been in commemoration on their relatives who stayed behind and were murdered in Poland.
But I also knew that this big group had survived in the East. And it was something I was curious about. And there were other touchstones. There was Uzbekistan where my father was born. What was this place so far away? There was the fake identities they took on to get into the United States after years in the refugee camps. And I actually ended up um you know, I ended up coming to immigration reporting. Probably partly from my family's story, but also
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Daniela Gerson to write *The Wanderers* and how did the project begin?
0:01–8:33
2
How did Daniela and Talia discover their families’ shared origins in the Polish town of Shamosh?
8:33–15:59
3
What was life like for Polish Jews who fled east into the Soviet Union during World War II?
15:59–21:37
4
Why did Stalin target Polish refugees in 1944 June 1940 and what were the consequences for them?
21:37–28:10
5
How did the families survive the Gulag and later settle in Uzbekistan and Central Asia?
28:10–36:47
6
Why is the story of the ‘Wanderers’ largely absent from popular Holocaust narratives?
36:47–45:20
7
How do contemporary refugee policies and the Ukraine‑Russia war echo the historical experiences described in the book?
45:20–52:43
8
What are Daniela’s upcoming projects and how does she plan to continue exploring migration stories?
52:43–1:02:10