Folio Literary Series with Daniela Gerson, June 10, 2026

Daniela Gerson met her wife, Talia Inlender, at a picnic in Los Angeles, not knowing that 75 years earlier their grandparents had left homes only blocks away from each other in a small Polish town, and fled east to Ukraine. The Gersons and the Inlenders went on parallel odysseys of 5,000 miles to survive the Holocaust – one that would, after a deceitful loyalty test from Stalin, put them on cattle cars to a Soviet Gulag, years in limbo in Central Asia, and ended, after a decade on the run, with new lives built on secrets and lies. Part genealogical detective story, part gripping history, and part contemporary reporting on war-torn territories, The Wanderers chronicles Daniela’s journey to unearth this past with her wife, and reveal its echoes in still-contested lands from Ukraine to Israel. The Wanderers is a groundbreaking narrative history, and a meditation on how a home left behind and a desperate journey to survive reverberates across borders and through generations. Daniela will be in conversation with Molly Tolsky, Editorial Director, Culture & Lifestyle at 70 Faces Media. About Daniela Gerson: An award-winning reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Public Radio International, and the Financial Times, Daniela Gerson is an associate professor of journalism at California State University, Northridge, and editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square. She previously worked as an editor at the LA Times and an immigration reporter for the New York Sun. She is also co-founder of the immigration newsletter Migratory Notes.