The subject of these memories was the search for an answer to the question of how and why history and communism, united, formed and inspired the life of an American Jew born in New York, whose father joined the US Communist Party in 1939. The memoir covers almost half a century of the period of domination of the Cold War ideology and three continents. They recreate the path of discovery and self-knowledge during the student years at Columbia University, graduate school at Oxford, searches in Soviet archives, in the coal deposits of Eastern Ukraine and in the newly independent Uzbekistan.