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

Journalist Gerson’s deeply felt debut braids her and her wife’s love story with an investigation into a lesser-known chapter of Jewish displacement during WWII. After Gerson met and fell for immigration attorney Talia Inlender, the pair discovered that their families both came from the same Polish village and fled to Ukraine as Nazi persecution intensified. The women’s romantic connection became a catalyst for Gerson to excavate their families’ lore, tracing the parallel journeys of their forebears while illuminating the fate of the roughly 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Nazis by fleeing to the Soviet Union. To construct her narrative, Gerson interviewed her own aging relatives and Inlender’s, some of whom died as the book was being researched and written. Along with tracing the two families’ paths from Poland to Ukraine to Israel, she elegantly interrogates the emotional and familial fractures created by forced migration, and the psychological toll of survival. In crisp, unadorned prose, Gerson restores a neglected history; notes its contemporary resonances, as people are uprooted by violence across the globe; and tenderly chronicles the relationship that brought this history to light. It’s a profoundly moving account. Agent: Andrea Blatt, WME. (Mar.)