This subject of this memoir is why and how history and communism combined to animate and shape the life of a New Yorkborn Jewish American whose father joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1939. It spans three continents and roughly half a century dominated by the ideologies at the heart of the Cold War. It recreates journeys of discovery and selfdiscovery first as an undergraduate at Columbia University then a graduate student at Oxford and then in Soviet archives the coalfields of eastern Ukraine and newly independent Uzbekistan. The memoir reveals not only fascination with but also affection for the Soviet people as they contended with actually existing communism and its supersession.