Books with author Marika Jeffery

Following the end of WW II, Emi Yazawa, a Japanese American, and Gita Kaminski, a Polish Jew meet as college roommates in California. As their postwar friendship unfolds, flashbacks reveal their individual stories during the war years and the senseless bigotry that led each to her physical and emotional internments. For Emi and her family, it’s a relocation camp in the desolate Arizona desert, where she struggles to understand why they were ripped from their idyllic life in San Diego and must now endure the indignities of forced imprisonment and the demeaning living conditions of the camp. After all, she and her two brothers are American citizens. How could their freedom be so easily taken away? For Gita and her family, it’s the massively overcrowded Warsaw Ghetto, where she witnesses the cruel behavior of the Nazis. As rumors of death camps surface, Gita escapes from the Ghetto and is taken to a Catholic convent for safety. Now without her family, Gita fights to suppress her true Jewish identity as she pretends to be a Christian, hiding in plain sight from the Germans.As college friends, Emi introduces Gita to her brother Toshiro, and love blooms between them. The couple’s love story and both women’s search for closure in the aftermath of their internment years bring all of them new beginnings and surprising family revelations.