Tracy Slater on her new book and parallels to today’s world

It takes place when the United States was reeling from Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and began rounding up people of Japanese descent. In February 1942, two months after the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The woman at the center of Slater’s story, Jewish American labor activist Elaine Buchman Yoneda, chose to go to a concentration camp with her half-Japanese son, Tommy, leaving her white daughter, Joyce, behind.

After the camps closed, Elaine and her husband, angry about what happened, campaigned for reparations. But later in life, they questioned whether they had been too compliant, whether they should have pushed back harder. As Slater puts it, “I think it was understandably hard for them to make peace with some of the choices that they made, given that there were no good choices at the moment.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

This broadcast interview was edited by Ally Schweitzer, with the digital version edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.