Displaced Persons

A journalist’s chronicle of coming to America with parents who escaped the Holocaust: “An extraordinary memoir, full of pride, tenderness, and love” (The New York Times Book Review).In this touching account, veteran New York Times reporter Joseph Berger describes how his own family of Polish Jews—with one son born at the close of World War II and the other in a “displaced persons” camp outside Berlin—managed against all odds to make a life for themselves in the utterly foreign landscape of post-World War II America. Paying eloquent homage to his parents’ extraordinary courage, luck, and hard work while illuminating as never before the experience of 140,000 refugees who came to the United States between 1947 and 1953, Berger has captured a defining moment in history in a riveting and deeply personal chronicle.