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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 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—alien and citizen, old and young, healthy and sick—or, 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 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 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.
