Daniela Gerson — The Wanderers
Immigration journalist traces her family's survival of the Holocaust in Poland and their dispersal across continents — a memoir of resilience and rupture.
Why we picked this
Gerson is an immigration journalist by profession — which means she brings specific analytical tools to a personal story about displacement and survival. The combination produces something more than family memoir.
Daniela Gerson’s “The Wanderers” traces her Polish Jewish family’s survival of the Holocaust and the paths that carried different family members to different countries — the United States, Israel, elsewhere. It is a book about what displacement does to families across generations: what is lost, what persists, and what the descendants of survivors carry without always knowing it.
Gerson is a journalist who has spent her career covering immigration, and that professional lens shapes the memoir. She brings a reporter’s instinct for structural explanation alongside the personal intimacy of family history. The result is a book that uses one family’s story to illuminate the broader experience of Jewish survival and diaspora in the twentieth century.
The talk will be open to audience questions and is suited for readers interested in Holocaust history, Jewish diaspora, or the specific challenge of writing family history across silences and incomplete archives.