Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp

On a late March morning in the spring of 1942, Elaine Buchman Yoneda awoke to a series of terrible choices: between her family and freedom, her country and conscience, and her son and daughter.

Born to Russian Jewish immigrants, Elaine was now married to a Japanese American man. But on this war-torn morning she was also a mother desperate to keep her young mixed-race son from being sent to Manzanar, the US concentration camp near Death Valley. The detention center was one of ten where our government would eventually imprison every person of Japanese descent along the entire West Coast--alien and citizen, old and young, healthy and sick--in the words of one official, anyone with even "one drop" of Japanese blood.

Elaine's husband, Karl, was already in Manzanar, but he planned to enlist as soon as the US Army agreed to send him to war. He was committed to fighting for that to which he and Elaine, pominent labor and anti-fascist activists, had long devoted their lives: 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 have to abandon her White daughter from a previous marriage.

Together in Manzanar tells the story of these fraught choices and conflicting loyalties, the upheaval and violence they engendered, and Elaine's quest survive with her children's lives intact and her family safe and whole.