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 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 and the wife of a Japanese American man. On this war-torn morning, she was also a mother desperate to keep her young mixed-race son from being sent to a US concentration camp. Manzanar, near Death Valley, was one of ten detention centers where our government would eventually imprison every person of Japanese descent along the West Coast.

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. 

Together in Manzanar 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’s lives intact and their family safe and whole.

Tracy Slater is a Jewish American writer from Boston, based in her husband’s country of Japan. Her first book, the mixed-marriage memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and one of PopSugar’s best books of 2015. Slater has 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.

Jennifer Noji is a public scholar, writer, and senior communications and development manager at Densho—a digital archival and historical nonprofit organization dedicated to safeguarding the history of Japanese American WWII Incarceration. She was born in Norway, grew up in New Jersey, and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. As the granddaughter of Gila River and Minidoka concentration camp survivors, she has dedicated much of her academic, professional, and personal life to learning and teaching about the WWII incarceration and other historical injustices. Jennifer holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Communications from Rutgers University, an M.A. from UCLA, and a PhD in Comparative Literature, with a concentration in Asian American Studies, from UCLA. Her scholarly work explores how literature reckons with US legacies of racial and colonial violence, and she has taught undergraduate courses on forced incarceration, displacement, critical race theory, and human rights, among other topics. She has published articles on memory and political violence in various academic journals and volumes.

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