THE WANDERERS

Gerson, an immigration journalist, and her wife, Talia, met in modern-day Los Angeles, fell in love, and married. They discovered that their families both came from the Polish city of Zamosc and that their lives are intertwined in ways they could not have imagined. They delved into the archives. They traveled to Poland. They soon saw that their ancestral hometown was beautiful. But that beauty belies the terrors of 80 years earlier, when Zamosc’s Jews were deported. Some, though, escaped—not west to America but east to Central Asia. The two women retraced their forebearers’ journeys. Stalin was relocating Jews and Germans to Uzbekistan, and they wound up in Tashkent, too. Writes Gerson, “I had traveled halfway around the world to see if I could locate the mysterious origins of my father, to tie me closer to his essence now that he was gone.” As if retracing a Silk Road of sorrow, the author takes readers to Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, then to Kazakh towns, Poland, Prague, and Palestine. “Our grandparents had been called bezhenets [refugees], repatrianci, infiltrees, and displaced persons. Now, they took on new labels and identities in new languages….To us, their descendants, they gifted a legacy of belonging.” Though etched in local detail, this is really a global tale for our own time. “I often return to the fickle nature of citizenship and survival in the face of state-sponsored violence that I uncovered in our grandparents’ journey,” Gerson writes. Today, when many Americans face questions to their citizenship, this book lets us know that true belonging lies less in the ink of a passport than in the blood of family.