This personal memoir recounts eighty-one years in the life of Eugene Solomon. Born in New York of immigrant parents to a mother from Poland and a father from Russia, it is a study of a child's rise to adulthood from poverty and welfare to financial success. It captures the gripping events of 1939, when his father dies leaving child and mother penniless in the Brooklyn slums, while across the world the German army invades Poland and traps and exterminates his mother's family of two-hundred, including parents and grandparents, ten married brothers and sisters all with little children, and scores of uncles, aunts, nieces, and nephews. But those remembrances are only Part One of this memoir. Mr. Solomon goes on to offer his personal observations on political happenings during his life, his religious grappling with God, anti-Semitism, male-female relationships, and his thoughts about aging and death.