Together in Manzanar
In 1942, amid the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, author Tracy Slater recounts how a Jewish mother fought to stay with her son.
Editor’s Note: This excerpt from Tracy Slater’s Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp recounts a shameful chapter in American history—when Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned during World War II. What gives this story particular weight for us is that the woman at the center of it, Elaine Yoneda, was a Jewish mother refusing to be separated from her son. I’m not usually one for historical analogies, so I won’t draw a straight line to current events. I’d rather let the story speak for itself. — Howard Lovy
Just past dawn on March 30, 1942, Elaine Buchman Yoneda stood on a Los Angeles sidewalk, unsure where to turn. She looked up at the building before her, solid concrete and stretching half a block: the South Spring Street civil control station, where she’d been ordered to bring her three-year-old son, Tommy, for deportation to a concentration camp.
In the early morning light, a cool wind strafed her cheek and rustled her brown curls. She hesitated for a moment, then straightened in resolve. Reaching under five feet, Elaine was known to stand tall in the face of adversity, rising as if she could launch past such minor constraints as nature, as if she’d tower over anything in her way. She paid no heed to biology’s limits; Elaine would stare down anyone who tried to take her son.
Keeping Tommy by her side, she surveyed the crowd of people already waiting, one long line snaking down South Spring Street. Overhead, trolley cables hung in the air, taut black wires against a pale sky. The streetcars would be getting even more use soon, as rubber rations made new tires scarce. Essentials would continue to dwindle now that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and the country was at war.
Many in line that morning wore their Sunday best, despite the new deprivations of wartime. They may have been Japanese, but almost all were American too. Some were likely US veterans, Elaine knew, having served their country faithfully. Not even that would matter now.
Before answering the order to appear that morning, men had donned ties and bowler hats, women pressed dresses and starched collars. Girls had forced their straight black hair into neat waves. Most stood quietly as they peered through the early light, some with heads craned forward, as if they might catch a glimpse of their fate. Elaine was the only white person among them.
Looking down, she watched the breeze disturb Tommy’s dark ringlets, their hue from her husband, their texture from her. The child breathed in and out, cold air filling his torso, each breath like a gift from the grip of his asthmatic chest. Elaine had spent much of his short life in and out of hospitals with him. Too much dust, too strenuous an exertion, could leave him gasping, liable to drown in the liquid of his lungs. But Elaine refused to give into fear. She would do whatever necessary to protect him.
It was him the army wanted, she’d been told over the phone by a priest the night before. Not you, the priest had explained. Not if you’re white, he meant— even though she’d given birth to a half- Japanese child. The clergyman was from the Maryknoll mission, a Roman Catholic order that had long worked with the Japanese American community, and was now assisting with their removal from the West Coast. Foreign or citizen, healthy or sick, loyal or lost: all had to go.
But as for Elaine, “Oh, you don’t have to go; you don’t have to go,” he’d said the previous evening, as she’d clutched the handset in her parents’ apartment, the darkness shrouding their home in the Jewish enclave of Boyle Heights.
Nor will you be allowed to, he’d suggested.
Elaine had stared, stupefied, into the air. She was trying, with little success, to absorb this frocked man’s nonsense. That day, March 29, 1942, Civilian Exclusion Order No. 3 had been issued: two thousand people of Japanese descent living around Elaine were to appear for processing by eight o’clock the next morning at the 707 South Spring Street civil control station, in preparation for transport 220 miles inland to a dusty plain called Manzanar at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. In no more than three days, by April 2 at noon sharp, not a soul among them should be left.
Elaine had heard the announcement herself over the radio that evening. It had been addressed to “All persons of Japanese ancestry, both aliens and non- aliens.” It conveyed an order, directly from the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army of the United States, with a time and place for those in the vicinity of Los Angeles to report the next day for “registration.”
According to the US Army, her son Tommy, like anyone along the West Coast with even “the slightest amount of Japanese blood,” was to be rounded up— evacuated, they called it— and sent to a camp. Hearing the announcement, Elaine had been frantic. Surely they wouldn’t try to take a three-year-old half-Japanese child.
She’d called the nearest army station. She’d called the Maryknoll mission. The only answer she could get was that she needed to appear the next morning, with Tommy, or she’d be in violation of the army’s order. According to federal law, she’d be subject to a fine of $5,000, imprisonment, or both.
Now on the sidewalk, with a rising sun throwing shadows across the pavement, Elaine saw a soldier and priest run toward her. “Not here! Not here!” she heard one of them shouting. The men surrounded Elaine and Tommy, then hurried them toward the building, the former Security-First National Bank. Etched columns still flanked the entrance, fluted pillars three stories high, stretching toward the cold expanse of sky.
Elaine knew immediately why these men balked at her presence in a line not meant for whites. Their haste failed to surprise. She had spent years leading labor demonstrations, protesting California’s racist and repressive policies, being menaced by Red Squad batons. She’d even been jailed, bruised by brass knuckles. She’d defied the state’s anti-miscegenation laws by marrying a Japanese American man, a fellow activist. So she would be not be cowed by this priest or soldier before her now.
The men ushered Elaine and Tommy inside, the priest again insisting that it was her son they wanted, not her. As if they were going to roll out the red carpet for her and then expect her to hand over her son. If these men thought she was just going to surrender her child, well then they really knew from nothing.
Three months and twenty- three days earlier, with Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than two thousand Americans had been killed. Since then, Elaine, her husband Karl, and their children had mostly stayed inside, avoiding the stares of strangers and barrage of disturbing headlines. Jap Beast and His Plot to Rape the World, read a 1942 magazine cover with a white woman pinned beneath a Japanese soldier’s rifle. Some newspapers couldn’t even bring themselves to print the term “Japanese American.” “Hyphenated Japs Face Thorough Investigation,” reported the January 19 front page of the Wilmington Daily Press Journal, the local paper on the waterfront where Karl worked as a longshoreman, before he was fired that winter for having Japanese ancestors. On February 2, a Los Angeles Times editorial went further: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched. . . . So a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents—grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”
Two weeks later, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, officially enabling the forced removal of anyone deemed a threat from the entire West Coast. Newsstands throughout the city placed the Los Angeles Times front and center: “U.S. Acts to End Jap Peril Here.” The implication was clear: even citizens of Japanese descent were now nothing more than “Japs,” or danger.
With the inevitability of being banished and with rampant rumors of violence against Japanese across the Western states, Karl had departed Los Angeles on March 23. He’d taken one of the very first transports to the Manzanar concentration camp, officially called Owens Valley Reception Center, in a desiccated plain near Death Valley. He’d volunteered to be among the first to go and build housing for those who would be sent after. Perhaps he could improve conditions somehow or help guarantee the safety and well-being of his community, now that all efforts to halt the forced removal had failed. He was sure that eventually they would all be taken.
The early Manzanar volunteers had been promised union wages, and without a job or source of income, Karl needed the work. To seal the deal, he’d been promised that families of volunteers would be the last imprisoned. He still doubted his wife and son would have to go anyway, because Elaine was white. And who would take a three-year-old half-Japanese child?
So Karl left his family where he thought they would be safe, with Elaine’s parents in Boyle Heights. The area held a mix of Eastern European Jews like the Buchmans and Japanese, Armenian, and Mexican immigrants. It was just a short distance from the control station where Elaine and Tommy had been ordered to appear that morning, bordering L.A.’s Little Tokyo, whose streets were lined with Japanese shops. Their signs, once bearing the bold strokes of the traditional kanji characters, were starting to be replaced by English posters: Big Sale, they read; Closing.
Elaine’s parents, like Karl’s, had immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century. The Buchmans had fled the bloody pogroms of Eastern Europe, where reports of the mass murder of Jews were beginning to emerge in March 1942. Yet in Los Angeles, the Buchmans assumed they were safe, because they were American citizens and they were white.
Despite the obvious indignity of America’s West Coast “evacuation” of Japanese Americans, Karl planned to enlist in the US military and fight the Axis as soon as the Allies would take him. He’d do whatever it took to defeat fascism. Who knew what the Japanese would do to a so- called “deserter” if they captured US soil? But more than that, Karl needed to protect his family. After all, his beloved Elaine was Jewish, and their son was a Japanese American Jew.
Karl had tried to enlist before he’d left for Manzanar, but the Army Recruitment Office had turned him away. Like all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, even war veterans, he had overnight been designated ineligible to serve, considered an “enemy alien” by his own country. These were among many heavy disappointments Karl had carried with him on the long and lonely trip to Manzanar a week earlier, when he’d departed along with a thousand other able- bodied men of Japanese descent on a cold, gray Los Angeles morning, the chill tempting some to turn up their collars.
In Manzanar, Karl ached for Elaine and Tommy, not knowing how or when he’d see them again. Or if. But within three days he’d seen enough of the broken, barren environment, with its howling sandstorms that stopped the men from working and coated every crevice thick with dust. He knew, even if visits were to be permitted, that his wife should not bring their son anywhere near Manzanar. The food alone was a threat, sending the men running repeatedly for the portable toilets. He wrote to Elaine, warning her against visiting even if the opportunity arose. She and Tommy should stay away, at least until Karl and the other early arrivals could improve conditions enough to tamp down the dust, perhaps by planting grass around the barracks and a vegetable garden. With Tommy’s allergies and asthma, the camp could kill him.
At South Spring Street a few days later, everything was calm and ordered, at least outwardly. “The physical facilities of each control station should be so arranged as to allow a natural flow of the activities,” the US Army’s Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) instructed in their Operating Procedures, which would eventually be distributed to administrators staffing 123 control stations up and down the coast. Desks were neatly placed, papers stacked, rifles ready.
“Provisions should be made,” the procedures noted, “so that only one exit and one entry is available.”
As for Elaine, the priest and army officer were trying to explain a situation she found incomprehensible. Though they insisted that Tommy needed to be taken, the priest repeated that she would absolutely not be allowed to go with him.
“It will be too hard for you,” he said.
Even in moments of friendly debate, Elaine was known to passionately advance her argument, drawing her small frame upward until she seemed to stand on tiptoe. “Disputatious,” an interviewer would one day call her. Now her voice reached full pitch, her body flashing with anger, as if she could launch herself right out of her little heels and loom over these men who simply refused to understand.
“If he goes, I go!”
Her husband Karl may have already been in Manzanar, but he would soon be leaving camp “in a khaki uniform!” to fight for a country that was as much his as theirs, she upbraided the pair before her. The government may have taken his job, but they hadn’t taken his citizenship, at least not yet. If they took Tommy to Manzanar now, he’d soon be alone there: a three-year-old child. Only half- Japanese. Parentless. In a concentration camp.
“The child must go!” the men before Elaine kept insisting. There would be an orphanage there, the priest placated, “a children’s village,” he called it, as if it might boast leafy streets and candy shops, with “well- trained sisters” to look after the little ones.
Elaine saw right through him, though she still had yet to see exactly where Karl had been sent. In her handbag, she carried the first letter he’d mailed from Manzanar. But it remained unopened, having arrived just as Elaine heard the radio announcement the night before, ordering her and her son to the control station the next morning. She hadn’t had time to read it, what with her frantic calling from one place to another, looking for a way out of what was surely an insane threat to lock up her son.
But she knew enough to know not to be fooled by this man who stood pale and impotent before her, this priest whose own god he couldn’t see was an illusion. In her mind, she spun through each impossible option. Where could she turn? Who could help her now? For a brief moment, her memory latched onto an earlier horror, one she’d only read about: how the American government, over one hundred years before, had taken whole peoples. The Cherokee. The Choctaw. The Creek. Dragged them from their homes, she thought. At the point of guns. Then decimated them. She knew her country could, in a flash, do it all again.
As for what the army would do now to her and her child, Elaine wasn’t sure. But one thing she knew: they would not take Tommy alone. If she had to, she would claw her way behind barbed wire to protect him.
Yet what of Joyce, her other child, her white one, fourteen years old and home now with Elaine’s parents? The three of them sat in Boyle Heights, alongside an emptying Little Tokyo, waiting and wondering: would Elaine return from Spring Street with Tommy, distraught without him, or not at all?
Meanwhile, Elaine stood at the control station and wondered too. Could she leave one child for the other? Would she forsake her first to protect her second?
Tracy Slater is an Ashkenazi Jewish American writer from Boston, based in her husband's country of Japan. Her most recent book is Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp. Her first book, the mixed-marriage memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self and Home on the Far Side of the World, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and one of PopSugar's best books of 2015. Slater has also published work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time magazine's Made by History, and other notable publications. She taught writing for over ten years in Boston-area universities and in men's and women's prisons throughout Massachusetts. She is the recipient of PEN New England’s Friend to Writers Award and received her PhD in English and American Literature from Brandeis University. You can find Tracy on her website.
Five tiny delights
Doing yoga in front of a big window with a view (a view outside, not in!)
Jogging while listening to music on noise-blocking earphones
Eating sweet potato pie
Reading all day in bed
Watching mystery/crime dramas while I clean the kitchen (the first part is the delight that gets me through the 2nd part...)
Five tiny Jewish delights
Eating Chinese food in Japan on Christmas eve
Watching our child get excited about lighting the candles on Shabbat or Passover
Thinking about the concept of Tikkun Olam & how it's similar in some and different in others to the Japanese concept or art of Kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer, so the breaks become beautiful in their own way
Filling plastic dreidels with chocolate coins. That never gets old, no matter how old I get!
Listening to my Japanese husband try to pronounce Hebrew words. In fairness, my Japanese pronunciation is even worse.
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This is so gripping, harrowing, and timely. And beautiful! Thank you so much for this, Tracy and Howard. I'm buying the book right now!
I love your book so much and am in so much awe of Elaine and Karl!