A Writer Finds Her Lost Roots and Gains Love and Hope
Daniela Gerson's "The Wanderers" reveals how the routes of one’s ancestors can be a goldmine of goosebumps.
Posted May 15, 2026 | Reviewed by Devon Frye
Daniela Gerson is an award-winning Los Angeles-based reporter, as well as an associate professor of journalism. When I read her new book, The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II , I realized that my and her (and her wife's) grandparents’ journeys from Europe overlapped in some ways, though at different times—and although I never deeply researched my own roots, I found Gerson’s discoveries familiar as well as fascinating.
I knew I had to interview her.
Susan K. Perry: To begin, let me just say I can’t count how many times your book gave me chills and goosebumps. Not only, I’m sure, because I can personally relate to some of your stories, but also due to your talented ability to combine so many disparate threads of thought, feeling, and history into a rational and compassionate whole. Can you estimate how long this book took you from first conception that it would be a book to actual publication day?
Daniela Gerson: It was five years ago in April that I wrote an essay for The New York Times on my late father's refugee history. In the editing process, when I told my editor that my wife and I were once from the same town in Poland, she responded "Now that's a book."
SKP: Was it your early connection with your wife Talia and her own Eastern European family’s history overlapping of your own that convinced you to undertake the thorough search that resulted in your book? The possibility that your and her ancestors may have known each other in the very same town?
DG: Even my editor did not know the extent of the story at the time, nor did we: That our grandparents had survived in the Soviet Union, via deportation to Siberia. That they were part of the biggest group of Jews to survive the Holocaust.
And beyond the sweeping history, as we started reporting, we found that there were all sorts of personal connections. Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and what began as a personal exploration was on contemporary war-torn territories.
SKP: I especially like the last paragraph of your afterword, in which you express your hope that your and Talia’s children will take from these pages something expansive and compassionate about all migrants fleeing persecution. I love that you want them to “learn not to accept any one narrative as an ultimate truth.” I also strove to write about and teach my own children to feel part of a wider world and not to get stuck in rigid mindsets. Do you have thoughts to add about that?
DG: Our grandparents never spoke about the suffering of the Poles in Zamość under the Nazis, but how could they when their own families had been murdered in concentration camps? But being two generations removed we can probe into parts of history that we might not have learned about ourselves.
Daniela Gerson, The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II (Grand Central Publishing, March 2026)
"Eight Tips for Investigating Your Own Family History" by Daniela Gerson.
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Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. , is a social psychologist and author. Her current focus is on the creative aspects of rationality and atheism.
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