Playwright, librettist, Tony nominee, and two-time Emmy Award-winning writer Sherman Yellen lovingly recreates the world of his impoverished forebears before World War I; his troubled, prosperous, mendacious father; his beautiful, willful fashion-model mother, and especially his own New York childhood in the 1930s and 40s in this remarkable family saga. Yellen's childhood witnessed both great events and the everyday life of a city boy in an embattled family, all viewed through the eyes of an observant little boy waiting impatiently for his body to catch up to his all-seeing consciousness. Yellen summons up this lost world of a New York Jewish-American family during the Great Depression and World War II with candor and love and brings it back to vivid new life.