An expansive yet intimate memoir of modern Jewish identity, following the diaspora of the author's own family to assay the impact of memory, displacement and disquiet. His emotionally lucid prose relives the anomie of European Jews after the Holocaust, following their journey from Lithuania to South Africa, England, the United States and Israel. This tale of remembrance and repression, suicide, resilience, moral ambivalence and uneasily evolving loyalties (religious, ethnic, national) both tells an unflinching personal story and contributes an important chapter to the ongoing narrative of Jewish life.