A Free, Virtual Author Talk by Tracy Slater on Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp

Tuesday, December 9 at 7pm on Zoom

Falmouth Jewish Congregation is honored to host Tracy Slater for this talk, to which everyone is invited. Pre-registration is required for this hour-long Zoom presentation. Click here to register:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/qLKtcf-ySPuqNpjxvzBeiA

Our partner, Eight Cousins Books in Falmouth, is selling copies of Together in Manzanar. Contact them at https://www.eightcousins.com

Critical praise for Together in Manzanar:

"Slater is acutely sensitive to the emotions and motivations of the people she describes, as well as to the larger issues of justice, race, and government accountability. Her account of prejudice, the abuse of power, and the rationalizations used to justify them, is as relevant today as ever. Slater’s natural empathy and sharp observations make this historical account a sensitive, affecting human story as well.” — Jewish Book Council

“A story of the past that is essential today.” - Akemi Johnson, author of Night in the American Village

“There is no end to the reasons for reading this book. It is a profoundly enlightening, rigorously researched and detailed history of the internment, and a riveting story as well” - Post Alley|Seattle

On a late March morning in the spring of 1942, Elaine Yoneda awoke to a series of terrible choices: between her family and freedom, her country and conscience, and her son and daughter. The child of Russian Jewish immigrants and the wife of a Japanese American man, war-torn morning, she was also a mother desperate to keep her young mixed-race son from being sent to the Manzanar detention camp. Elaine’s husband Karl was already in Manzanar, but he planned to enlist as soon as the US Army would take him. The Yonedas were prominent labor and antifascist activists, and Karl was committed to fighting for what they had long cherished: equality, freedom, and democracy. Yet when Karl went to war, their son Tommy, three years old and chronically ill, would be left alone in Manzanar—unless Elaine convinced the US government to imprison her as well. The consequences of Elaine’s choice did not end there: if she somehow found a way to force herself behind barbed wire with her husband and son, she would leave behind her white daughter from a previous marriage.
Together in Manzanar tells the story of a Jewish-Japanese American family’s painful choices and conflicting loyalties, the upheaval and violence that followed, and the their quest to survive with their children’s lives intact and their family safe and whole.

Visit Tracy Slater's website for more information, press and resources: http://www.tracyslater.com/

Tracy Slater is an American writer from Boston living temporarily in Toronto, although her family is usually based in Japan, her husband's country. Her essays and articles have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time magazine's Made by History, The Best Women's Travel Writing, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Literary Hub, and The Chronicle Review, among other places.

Her latest nonfiction book, Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp, was published on July 8, 2025, by Chicago Review Press.