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This autobiography traces life in Moscow from the 1930s through the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992. Though the story of the author's family is at the book's core, the turbulent history of the country in those years inevitably seeps into the most personal events. A happy childhood is set against the terror of the 1930s, when friends and relatives, including a grandfather, mysteriously disappear. The school years, during World War II, are spent in part in a besieged Moscow. Studies at the medical institute take place during the final mad years of Stalin's regime, culminating in the infamous "Doctor's Plot" and the escalation of anti-Semitism. This account of a happy marriage, family life, and fulfilling career--all in a country isolated from the world by the iron curtain--takes the reader through the perestroika and, finally, to the family's immigration to America.