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 the US concentration camp Manzanar.

 Manzanar was one of ten detention centers where our government would eventually imprison everyone 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 “one drop” of Japanese blood. Elaine's husband Karl was already there, but he would enlist if 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 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 safe, their family whole, and their ethics intact.

“With dramatic flair, Slater captures the untold story
of a high-profile mixed-race couple inside an
American concentration camp at a pivotal
moment in history”
Frank Abe, coeditor of The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

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