Together in Manzanar, with Tracy Slater
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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. She was the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, the wife of a Japanese American man, and a mother desperate to keep her youngest child from being sent to Manzanar–one of ten detention centers where the US government would eventually imprison everyone of Japanese descent along the West Coast—alien and citizen, old and young, healthy and sick.
Elaine’s husband Karl was already there, but he would enlist as soon as the US Army would take him. Prominent labor and antifascist activists, both Yonedas were deeply committed to fighting for equality, freedom, and democracy. When Karl went to war, their son Tommy, three years old and chronically ill, would be alone in Manzanar—unless Elaine convinced the US government to imprison her as well. But if she somehow found a way to force herself behind barbed wire with her husband and son, she would have to choose whether to support the Allied cause against fascism from inside an American concentration camp. She would also have to leave behind her white daughter from a previous marriage.
Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp tells the story of these painful choices and conflicting loyalties, the upheaval and violence that followed, and the Yonedas’ quest to survive with their children safe, their family whole, and their ethics intact.
Tracy Slater is a Jewish American writer from Boston, based in her husband’s country of Japan. Her latest book is a work of narrative history titled Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp (Chicago Review Press, 2025), named a Jewish Book Council Recommended Summer Read and featured by NPR Morning Edition, among other media outlets. Her previous book was the mixed-marriage memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015). It was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and one of PopSugar’s best books of 2015. Slater has also published work in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time Magazine’s Made by History, and more. She taught writing for over ten years in Boston-area universities and in men’s and women’s prisons throughout Massachusetts. She is the recipient of PEN New England’s Friend to Writers Award and holds a PhD in English and American literature from Brandeis University.