Memoir prose of the son of an Odessa lawyer, whose first memories (the narrator) were pre-war Odessa and the peculiar, already lost culture of the then intelligentsia life; then the war, during which the boy learns what it means to be a Jew; the family's attempts to survive during the occupation - the boy persuades his mother that they will not kill us, but the mother is killed (the father, like many of those around them, were repressed after the war). The story ends in 1945, when the narrator turned eight years old. In other words, it’s a story about childhood, and it’s a story—with living in the text and understanding what is depicted—and not an eyewitness account.