This memoir, whimsical and poignant, follows the author from early schooling in Turkey and, later, Germany, through graduation from Oxford. His Warsaw graduate studies were interrupted in 1939 by volunteer service in the Polish army; captured by Nazi troops, he escaped back to now-occupied Warsaw and joined the Polish Resistance until recruited by the American OSS in Istanbul. In 1949 his young family emigrated to the U.S. where he established himself as a Russian scholar, verse translator and linguist. The final chapters find him in Sicily, completing his translation of Goethe's Faust and writing on the delights and oddities of life in Taormina.