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They escaped the Nazi genocide, but these ‘Wanderers’ still went through hell
The Wanderers
By Daniela Gerson
Grand Central, 336 pages, $30
Daniela Gerson is a journalist with years of experience reporting about immigration, in a time when immigrants are commonly derided as interlopers who will do anything to weasel into America, including by telling untruths. She is also the daughter of a father whose immigrant parents — Gerson’s paternal grandmother and grandfather — lied through their teeth to get here.
The long story leading to why they did this grounds Gerson’s fascinating memoir, which explores a chapter of the Holocaust that is largely unknown in America, even to Jews: about Polish Jews who went not to Auschwitz or to attics, but instead to the Soviet Union. The story defines her family and that of Talia Inlender, a Los Angeles immigration attorney whom Gerson met at a party several years ago. Chatting there, they realized that Inlender’s Jewish paternal grandfather was from the same Polish city as Gerson’s Jewish grandparents. The coincidence drew the two women together, and they ended up marrying, having kids, and digging further into their shared ancestral history. Their excavation has culminated in The Wanderers.
On the eve of World War II, about 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland — more than in any other country in Europe. By 1945, more than 90% of them were dead. About three quarters of the few who survived did so only because they’d spent the war in the Soviet Union. They escaped Nazi genocide but still lived through hell.
For years, Gerson knew this basic history. She knew that in 1939 Poland had been carved in two, west and east, by Germany and the Soviet Union when the two countries signed a non-aggression pact. In the immediate aftermath of the partition, hundreds of thousands of Poles felt more frightened of Hitler than Stalin, and they fled into Soviet territory. But their flight was chaotic. Many lived on the streets or in rooms with no heat, and with little to eat. In Lviv, now in Ukraine but then in the USSR, Gerson’s grandparents experienced their first devastation: Their eight-month-old son fell ill with pneumonia and died.
Inlender’s grandfather’s wife and young son, meanwhile, had opted to remain in Poland. Soon after making that decision, they were shot to death during a Nazi roundup of Jews.
As conditions on the Russian side worsened, almost everyone who’d fled Poland, including Jews, told the Soviets they wanted to go back to the German-run area. The Soviets responded by labeling such people untrustworthy, bourgeois, and traitorous. So, beginning in summer 1940, thousands of Poles, including eight Gersons and several Inlenders, were packed into boxcars and shipped thousands of miles east, to gulags and forced labor camps. There they were consigned to backbreaking work in mines and forests, fed very little, and crowded into vermin infested shacks with little heat in winter. Starving and exhausted, the prisoners were told by their overseers to get used to it, because they were never going home again. At least a quarter of them perished.
Then, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in summer 1941, the enslaved Poles were freed from the gulags. Waves of them headed south to the USSR’s five Central Asian republics: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Many wanted to enter Iran and proceed to Palestine. The Gersons tried this but the borders were closed. They backtracked to Uzbekistan. Inlender’s grandfather landed in Kazakhstan.
Again there was hunger and homelessness. Typhoid fever and other deadly epidemics raged. Polish Christians and Jews alike — as well as citizens of the Soviet Union whose homelands were overrun by Nazis — wandered the streets. Everyone suffered.
Some lied to stay alive. Mikhal Dekel, who wrote a book about her Polish-Jewish father’s survival under similar circumstances, noted that, in Central Asia, child refugees, including Jewish children, roamed alone and starving. The parents of others turned them over to Christian orphanages. Historian Gennady Estraikh has written about Jewish children running away from adult relatives, knocking on the doors of those orphanages, and falsely claiming they had no family. Their lies saved their lives.
Gerson doesn’t discuss this specifically, but I imagine the two of us have some common experiences with lying. Like her, I am a longtime journalist focusing on immigration, mainly into the U.S. from Latin America. During the first Trump administration, I met parents who’d fled violence in their home countries, then walked or rode in boxcars to the southern U.S. border, only to be turned back by American immigration authorities and sent to languish in filthy, dangerous encampments on the Mexican side of the line. I saw teenagers in those camps steal away from their mothers and fathers and cross into Texas by claiming they were orphans — they did this because the U.S. was still accepting what immigration law calls “unaccompanied minors.” I saw parents weeping as they kissed their seven year olds goodbye and directed them over the international bridge, with instructions to falsely say they had no mother and father.
And I met adults with carefully planned confabulations. Once I talked with a man who was sifting through Google to study, he told me, how gay men act. He confessed that he wasn’t gay but was learning to walk, dress and behave as though he was, because the U.S. was letting people in who might be attacked in Mexico by homophobes. A woman told me she tried to buy urine from someone who was pregnant, because with a doctor’s certification of pregnancy, she might be let in, too.
What were these people really escaping from? Homicidal gangs? Murderous cartels? Hunger? Hopelessness? Whatever it was, they knew better than to tell truths that mean nothing in U.S. immigration law.
After World War II, most Polish Jewish survivors ended up in displaced persons camps in Europe. The Gersons wanted to get into one that was being run by the United States. But it did not allow new admissions, and the family had not left the Soviet Union until 1946. By then they had a baby boy, born in Uzbekistan. He would grow up to be Daniela’s father. The family wanted to go to America, but McCarthyist immigration restrictions defined Polish Jews, according to one Congress member, as “a gang of well-trained Communists” who would spread through America and plot to overthrow the government.
The Gersons finally made it into America via subterfuge. A couple who were named Blumstein, also with a baby boy, had received permission to enter the displaced persons camp but then abandoned the permission document. The Gersons got a hold of it and started masquerading as the Blumsteins. A few years later, when restrictions against Polish-Jewish immigration loosened, they sailed into New York Harbor under that surname. They spent the next decade in terror of being discovered. An expensive lawyer finally straightened everything out, and by the 1960s they were again the Gersons.
Daniela’s father, Allan Gerson, later became a Nazi-hunter prosecutor for the Department of Justice. His job was deporting Eastern Europeans who had assisted with Nazi atrocities. His method was ironic: He had merely to show that they lied when they applied to live in America — just as his parents had lied. Worried that low-level collaborators would be deported back to Communist countries, judged as criminals without due process, and put before firing squads, he quit the job.
According to his daughter’s memoir, Allan Gerson’s politics were neo-conservative. Nevertheless, he was outspokenly sympathetic toward today’s undocumented young people, the so-called “Dreamers” who came to the United States as children with their undocumented parents. “I was an illegal immigrant,” he wrote in 2017 in the Washington Post. He lamented that Dreamers “stand to be deprived of life as they know it, shipped off to some land they hardly recognize.”
He went to one of those lands in his later years. Did he connect with it spiritually? As a hobbyist art photographer before his death in 2019, he ranged up and down the U.S.-Mexico border, taking photo after photo after photo, almost obsessively, of border walls —those cruel, hard structures meant to exclude our new wandering generations. He shot the walls from the Mexico side, in extreme close up, rendering them almost abstract. But he often included their graffiti. It was giant and brilliantly colored. Likewise, those features in his daughter’s memoir illuminate a history that still shades our place and time.
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Pioneering restaurant chain Taïm closes, outlets padlocked for unpaid taxes
Taïm Mediterranean Grill, a pioneering fast casual Israeli food chain, is closing locations across the country, after New York State issued warrants for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.
The restaurant, founded by Israeli-American celebrity chef Einat Admony and now owned by the Illinois-based conglomerate Craveworthy Brands had expanded across New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Last week, pictures of two of New York City locations appeared on social media, with signage saying they had been seized by the state for nonpayment of taxes.
In an email to the Forward, a representative for Admony wrote that “she is unable to comment on the current status of the chain,” having not been involved with it since 2022.
When Admony first opened Taïm in New York’s West Village in 2005, it was one of the city’s first fast casual Mediterranean options. Zagat and New York Magazine gave the restaurant rave reviews, and lines formed outside the door.
Taïm opened its second location in 2012, and in 2018, former Chipotle executive Phil Petrilli and business partners invested in the restaurant and led its expansion across the country. By that time, Taïm faced a more crowded market, competing with Miznon, another Israeli fast casual creation by celebrity-chef Eyal Shani, and Cava, a Mediterranean bowl restaurant.
The restaurant switched ownership in 2024 when Craveworthy Brands bought Petrilli’s restaurant platform. But a year later, the state of New York issued dozens of tax warrants to Taïm-related entities at multiple locations. Some stores closed ahead of the recent round of state seizures.
The state has held both Pitrelli and Craveworthy’s CEO, Gregg Majewski, responsible for taxes owed. Pitrelli is currently suing Majewski, alleging that under their merger agreement, Majewski and Craveworthy are liable for all debts incurred by Taïm.
In his lawsuit, Pitrelli alleged the Taïm outlets owed $632,000 in unpaid taxes. Majewski did not respond to a request for comment; the Forward has reached out to his attorney.
Since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel, Taïm, which is Hebrew for “delicious,” has received some pushback. It has appeared on boycott lists and posts, criticizing it for being “Israeli owned,” even though its current owner is not Israeli. In a recent Instagram post noting the closure, users took to the comments to criticize the restaurant for being Israeli. However, a push to boycott Taïm specifically has not received as much widespread attention from the BDS movement as Goldie, a Philadelphia chain run by celebrity chef Michael Solomonov that recently closed six locations.
The restaurant currently brands itself as “Mediterranean,” though in the past it hashighlighted its Israeli background.
Others criticized Taïm for reasons unrelated to geopolitics. “They ruined that place when they changed the menu and made it like a big chain fast casual place,” one FoodNYC Redditor commented.
“Place has been going downhill for years, I’m not surprised,” another said.
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Antisemitism flourishes amid cultural and historical illiteracy. Classrooms should be a cure.
School will be back in session before we know it. A smattering of the headlines in the final weeks of the last academic year, coinciding with Jewish American Heritage Month in May, suggest that fighting antisemitism in educational environments will remain a monumental challenge.
They include a lawsuit against the nation’s largest teachers’ union for encouraging discrimination against Jewish teachers and students, a Texas private school displaying maps of the Middle East erasing Israel, swastikas scrawled on multiple school grounds in Massachusetts and in Georgia, and — just a few blocks from my child’s former school, which has had its own share of such issues — a flag bearing the hate symbol billowing over New York University.
The scene in the streets this summer has been arguably as bleak. Hate crimes against Jews are on the rise, even as rates of other major crimes fall. In response to the stabbing of a Jewish man in a kippah as he exited the Jewish Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Democratic congressional nominee Micah Lasher implored Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do more than react with the requisite expressions of empathy and promises of increased security, but to “take the temperature down” rather than foster a climate that jeopardizes Jewish safety.
Taking the temperature down is exactly what’s in order. We need proactive, preventative action from our political leaders, in New York City and beyond, to transform an environment in which antisemitic attacks still comprise the majority of hate crimes, and harsh words can too often combust into violence.
The good news is that we have a ready-made place to continue this urgent work: classrooms. As an educator, I have a strong sense of how historical and cultural illiteracy are far more rampant than unrepentant antisemitism, and that this is where we must focus our educational efforts in a more deliberate way than we currently do.
Ignorance provides antisemitism, an insidious shapeshifter that infects and unifies the otherwise polarized political right and left, with a powerful accelerant. Yet the only times when K-12 students might encounter Jewish experiences are in a Holocaust unit — mandated in 29 states — or in an antisemitism training, often introduced reactively after an incident. Neither approach addresses a generalized illiteracy about Jewish identity and experience that allows this hatred to fester. These traditional methods of “fighting antisemitism,” including in classrooms, are important but inadequate.
Rather than teaching about Jews primarily as targets of hatred — the obvious organizing principle of many lessons on the Holocaust and antisemitism training — it is crucial that students learn about Jewish identities and experiences as inextricable from our broader national narratives. When Jews are understood as full members of the polity, and as diverse participants in every historical era — as labor organizers and industry leaders, fashion designers and film directors, athletes and intellectuals — it becomes much harder to caricature us as evil or outsiders, or to render us invisible.
Such historical accuracy, rigorous source analysis, and a spirit of cultural inclusiveness, is the ethos of the New York City public schools’ Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History curriculum materials, for which I serve as lead scholar. Volume 1 is out now, and Volume 2 will be released later this fall.
A two-volume collection of profiles, original sources, guiding questions, and analytical essays written and reviewed by experts, the free materials enable history and social studies teachers to enrich existing lessons, or to create entirely new units of study.
Rich narratives about individuals illuminate broader historical eras, whether organizer Clara Lemlich on Progressive Era labor legislation, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis on transformed legal approaches to monopoly, or Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s advocacy for sex education, to name a few. Moreover, Hidden Voices explores how each individual’s Jewishness shaped their contributions to American society.
Rather than just sprinkling in a few Jewish figures into existing narratives, “Portrait of an Era” essays show how integrating stories of both luminaries and lesser known Jews nuances and challenges dominant historical frameworks – like “the Civil Rights Era,” or “Postwar America” – in ways that render history more accurately, and more interestingly.
For example, what does it say about the early national period of a country founded on religious freedom that Rabbi Isaac Leeser worried Jews would become “Christianized,” and thus offered sermons in English, while simultaneously advocating for the “Judaization” of American Jews? Or, how is the notion that American Jews “became white” after World War II challenged by the fact that the first, and only, Jewish Miss America, Bess Myerson, sparked a torrent of complaints to pageant organizers, was disinvited from various appearances, and was encouraged to choose a less Jewish name (she didn’t)?
Hidden Voices is no hagiography — history as hero worship — even as one of its aims is to challenge negative stereotypes. Since students might only encounter one of these profiles throughout their studies, we were especially judicious in selecting individuals that highlight the complexity of history and of humanity. For example, Spaniard Luis de Caravajal y de la Cueva, whose family converted to Roman Catholicism but secretly practiced Judaism under the threat of death, arrived in the New World to advance colonization. Yet he used this position to rescue other persecuted conversos. Many years later, we profile Groucho Marx, who with his brothers indelibly shaped the worlds of vaudeville and film, new industries where Jews found success in part because antisemitism excluded them from more established ones.
Emphasizing Jews’ role in U.S. history at large is crucial, but so is educating about the specificity of Jewish experience, from the momentous — including the Holocaust and Israel’s founding – to the everyday, like mainstreaming blue jeans and bagels and establishing overnight camps. Cultural topics are especially powerful teaching tools, for students are often less guarded in discussing food or fashion than when grappling with the most fraught political questions. Given so many current conversations about Jews now turn to Gaza, Hidden Voices decenters this conflict to offer a wider lens on a diverse people too often unhelpfully decontextualized.
Why isn’t a more robust Jewish-American history curriculum already a staple in more schools, especially given how largely other identities loom in our classrooms and our culture? Indeed, Hidden Voices — which has covered race, ability, and other categories — has existed since 2018 in New York City, home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, and yet the project I lead was only commissioned in late 2023, spurred by Oct. 7. While Volume 1 has been downloaded 200,000 times, and encouraging reports of teachers using the materials are rolling in, integrating these Jewish stories into the study of U.S. history and culture remains optional.
Multiple factors account for this relative absence of Jewish stories in the teaching of American history, in New York City and nationwide: foremost, the widespread, reductive assumption that identity and power in the United States operate around a Black-white binary, with Jews on the white, privileged side, and thus not a marginalized group worthy of attention. Similarly, many identity-based frameworks focus on “underrepresented” groups, which Jews — despite comprising a tiny minority — are not. Lastly, many such curricula are introduced due to parental advocacy, but Jewish Americans have largely expended such energy on building a Jewish education network outside the public system.
Overlooking Jewish American history and experience intensifies both antisemitism and historical illiteracy, and must be addressed. While Hidden Voices may appear to “just add Jews” into a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework, it actually represents a subtly, but substantially, different intervention. First, the argument for such programs is often for people to “see themselves.” While I hope Jewish schoolchildren feel affirmed by such visibility, that aim is profoundly parochial. Learning the history of Jews — or Latinos, LGBTQ people and others — is not primarily valuable in order to cultivate particularistic pride, a dubious aim for a secular school in a pluralistic society. Rather, it is to equip all students to navigate our shared society with evidence, empathy, and universalism. Actually, a Jewish history curriculum arguably stands to be most valuable in districts without Jews at all, but ample room for antisemitism to fester unchecked by interpersonal experience.
I understand the skepticism of staking our hopes on a better future for Jewish Americans in educational institutions; I’ve been a vocal critic of how alienating these places have been to many since 10/7. To be sure, education is no magic pill, and ignorance is not our only enemy. Avowed antisemites and ideologues exist in K-12 and college classrooms, as in all professions, and they too demand our unsparing attention. But for the vast majority of Americans with scant awareness of Jewish history or experience, teaching and learning about Jews as integral to this nation’s past and present is a new, and potentially powerful intervention. We owe it to each other to pressure our politicians and our public schools to at least try it.
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What does DSA actually want? Its national co-chair can’t say.
It’s been a heady couple of months for the Democratic Socialists of America. Candidates the organization rallied behind ousted establishment Democrats in New York, Michigan, Colorado and Wisconsin state primaries. Pundits who doubted the movement last year are now eating crow.
With the DSA having forced its way into the spotlight, national co-chair Megan Romer went on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast to share what the movement is all about. But the interview has elicited an online backlash — and some ridicule — after Romer said she would have attended an Oct. 8 protest and that she would have sought to stop Russia’s advance in Ukraine through diplomacy.
Just as damning to some viewers was Romer’s reluctance to provide specifics on a number of DSA policy positions when pressed for them by New Yorker editor David Remnick.
The backlash to the interview put Romer on the defensive. The day after its publication the national co-chair called Remnick a “debate bro” who had tried to make her look and feel stupid during the conversation. Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, has edited The New Yorker since 1998.
“Luckily lots of practice keeping my temper in check when debate bros are well-actually’ing me, tho it still flusters me,” Romer wrote Saturday on X. “I am def particularly sensitive when people are actively trying to make me look/feel stupid and it can throw me off my game.”
The interview highlighted a challenge that faces the organization as it gains members and breaks through on the Democratic stage: Translating its rallying cries into the gritty work of partisan politics — or, for the candidates DSA champions, getting things done while remaining true to the movement’s ideals.
Nowhere was that clearer than Romer’s talking points on Israel. Romer said the organization’s position was “a free Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem, and so I think that can safely be read as a one-state solution.” When Remnick asked her if DSA would have supported the proposed terms of the Camp David summit in 2000, had the Palestinians accepted it, Romer said: “Good question — I’d have to actually look at what the specifics there were.”
(The exact terms discussed at the summit are in dispute, but most agree it would have involved a separate Palestinian state with a capital comprising several Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem.)
A testy exchange followed around Romer’s stance on the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Asked whether she supported New York congressional primary winner Darializa Avila Chevalier in attending a “pro-Hamas” rally on Oct. 8, Romer said yes — she would have gone herself.
“If you put people in an open air concentration camp, and you deprive people of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety,” Romer said, “you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long. And that is not defending any harm of civilians or of non-combatants.”
Remnick replied, “Well, sure it is — you said you’re supporting it.”
Romer said, “I’m saying that I think it was inevitable.”
On issue after issue, Remnick pressed Romer for details and found few.
- Romer said DSA wanted to “tax the hell out of millionaires” but demurred on what that would mean in practice.
- Romer said she believed in open borders, but not in “throwing the gates open.” When Remnick asked if that wasn’t just immigration reform — which is to say the Democratic policy platform — Romer replied, “It means reforming the system we have while we rethink the system, while we build this new one from the ground up, and then hopefully eventually flipping the switch.”
- Romer said she did not believe in sending arms to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. She asked Remnick, “Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual diplomacy? Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual sending actual human beings to talk to human beings?” Remnick pointed out that there had been many attempts of diplomacy, “however failed,” since the beginning of the war.
- Remnick asked Romer what she meant when she said she believed in prison abolition. She answered that the safest communities were not ones with cops on every corner, but ones with “good schools, good jobs, good park systems, good recreation for their teenagers, things like that. Those are the safe communities.”
- As for her support for defunding the police, Romer said she was “not in favor of getting rid of police entirely tomorrow” but that she supported decreasing their budgets until a point where social services were sufficiently funded.
For the most part, Remnick — trying to fit Romer into a 30-minute podcast slot — let Romer’s answers speak for themselves whether they answered his question or not. But he did hint at a broader argument in one of his final questions, about the DSA’s position in favor of abolishing the U.S. Senate.
Given the scant likelihood of such a measure passing, Remnick asked, didn’t it distract from policy goals that were more likely to succeed?
“I don’t think so,” Romer replied. “I think taking principled positions tells people that you’re principled, and I think we see voters really responding to that, and we see people saying, ‘Oh, you’re actually thinking about the systems.’”
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