The WANDERERS is HERE!!!!
My Wanderers and Yours --> please share your story
Dear Migratory Notes community,
I’m thrilled, and more than a bit anxious, to share my book, THE WANDERERS, with the world this week! It’s deeply personal. I tell the story about my unexpected love story with my wife, immigration attorney Talia Inlender, and our late fathers’ intertwined refugee sagas. Our story is also urgent and all too relevant. I report on how our grandparents were part of a largely unknown survival journey that reveals universal themes of immigration and autocratic leaders shutting borders.
The first week of publication can be critical for a book’s success. At this dire time for the industry, it signals to retailers that there’s excitement and momentum.
Five Ways You Can Make a Difference:
1) BUY THE WANDERERS
Yes, here it is, in bookstores as of Tuesday! You can order from wherever you buy books (links here), or support your local independent bookseller - if they don’t have the book yet, please ask them to order it!
2) SHARE THE WANDERERS
When you receive your copy — thank you!! — please tag me @dhgerson and #TheWanderers (on all the socials). Nothing makes me happier than seeing the book in the hands and homes of people I care about!
3) LEAVE A REVIEW
I need smart people like you to share. (Please, don’t let the punk who gave The Wanderers one star on Goodreads before he could have gotten his hands on the book have the last word! Let’s change that!) Leave a review on Goodreads or wherever you bought the book and, yes, I hate to say it, Amazon).
4) COME TO AN EVENT!
Check out my stellar event lineup. I get to be in conversation with my literary heroes. And I’d love if you could join. Some events are virtual, and if I’m not coming to your city yet, let’s change that!
5) SHARE YOUR WANDERERS
I hope The Wanderers will build connections across migration experiences. Today, I’d love for you to join me in sharing your family’s story. Please add #TheWanderers, and tag my social: (Instagram, FB, Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn) so I can see your stories and reshare. Here’s an image and sample language.
The Wanderers has been five years in the making, though I really started researching three decades earlier when I first interviewed my grandparents. Launching this Passover week is a rollercoaster of reconnecting with family and missing those who are no longer with us. I wrote for Zócalo and the LA Times (also coming out Tuesday) about the wandering that is so often overlooked between the bitterness and sweetness, oppression and liberation. And how ties to community can help pull us through to the other side. This book has taken a village in all ways - thank you for being a part of that village.
With love and gratitude,
Daniela
PS - sharing some of the rave feedback The Wanderers has received.
“[Gerson’s] impassioned tale spans decades, continents, languages, and coping mechanisms, and it provides a significant voice to a lesser known experience of Polish Jews. Gerson doesn’t shy away from the hard realities their families faced and the legacy and consequences that remain for current and future generations worldwide.”
- BOOKLIST, starred
“The Wanderers sometimes reads like an action thriller...a book that can’t fail to stir the reader’s conscience, especially today, when nationalism is on the rise and immigrants are demonized.”
—JASON K. FRIEDMAND for the JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL
“A uniquely vivid story of Holocaust wandering, told as a tale of modern self-discovery.”
- KIRKUS REVIEWS
“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.”
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“The Wanderers is a heavy-duty journalistic adventure told with novelistic verve. Along the way, you can’t help but be drawn in by the almost mystical romance that develops between two women, passing forward a shared inheritance of survival.”
- ROBERTO SURO, author of Strangers Among US and Writing Immigration
“The Wanderers is a family memoir unlike any other, crafted by a writer who is equal parts detective, historian, and dutiful daughter. Epic in scope, it crosses three continents, from twenty-first century Los Angeles, to war-torn Polish shtetls, Ukrainian crossroads, and the windswept villages of Central Asia. This book is an unforgettable testament to the resolve and strength of a family, and a people.”
- HÉCTOR TOBAR, author of Our Migrant Souls
“Gerson’s powerful, expert inquiry into her family’s Holocaust experience skillfully illuminates our responsibility to carry forth the stories of those who came before us.”
- GEORGIA HUNTER, author of We Were the Lucky Ones and One Good Thing
“Self-reflective, committed to truth telling, and painfully aware that victimhood does not imply innocence, Gerson takes the reader on an enthralling journey through multiple hells and layer upon layer of tragedy for more than one people.”
- MARCI SHORE, author of The Ukrainian Night and The Taste of Ashes
“Daniela Gerson’s captivating debut sheds light on a fascinating and forgotten Holocaust story. Gerson masterfully weaves together the personal and the historical, the romantic and the political, the commonplace and the spiritual. Her voice is fresh, direct and wise. The Wanderers taught me not only about WW2 and current events, but about my own family’s repressed story.”
―JUDY BATALION, New York Times bestselling author of The Light of Days and The Last Woman of Warsaw (out next week!)
“The Wanderers is a fascinating tale told by a sleuth with the instincts of a bloodhound, uncovering long-lost mysteries that offer warnings for the future.”
- ALEX STOROZYNSKI, author of Spies in My Blood
