Born in 1914 in Czernovitz in what is now Ukraine, the author was successively a citizen of Austro-Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union as the bloody tides of the C20th swept to and fro before becoming stateless. This extraordinary memoir – unsentimental, startlingly clear, often shocking – is written through portraits of his mother, his father, his sister and his remarkable Ruthenian wetnurse/nanny, who spoke several languages but none fluently. No nostalgia here but instead a vivid and unforgettable portrait of a vanished world whose shades remain with us, intensely so. “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”