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January 2006

Farewell to Manzanar
by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Mama knew they were taking all the alien men first to an interrogation center right there on the island. Some were simply being questioned and released. In the beginning she wasn't too worried; at least she wouldn't let herself be. But it grew dark and he wasn't back. Another day went by and we still had heard nothing. Then word came that he had been taken in to custody and shipped out. Where to, or for how long? No one knew. All my brothers' attempts to find out were fruitless.

What had they charged him with? We didn't know that either, until an article appeared the next day in the Santa Monica paper, saying he had been arrested for delivering oil to Japanese submarines offshore.

My mother began to weep. It seems now that she wept for days. She was a small, plump woman who laughed easily and cried easily, but I had never seen her cry like this. I couldn't understand it. I remember clinging to her legs, wondering why everyone was crying. This was the beginning of a terrible, frantic time for all my family. But I myself didn't cry about Papa, or have any inkling of what was wrenching Mama's heart, until the next time I saw him, almost a year later.

Farewell to Manzanar gives a vivid and historic account of the Wakatsuki family's attempt to survive the indignities and humiliation of forced detention during the Second World War. Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp with 10,000 other Japanese Americans. This biographical classic gives a gripping and heart wrenching account of what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire, searchlight towers and armed guards in the United States.

This synopsis was written by a San José Public Library librarian

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Read On! - More books on the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
(Select any title to request it from the library's catalog)

• Fighting for Honor by Michael L. Cooper
• I am an American by Jerry Stanley

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