From stop to stop in the author's chaotic journey through life, dozens of typical heroes, relatives and friends, tzaddikim and Hasidim, rabbis and scholars, peasants and nobles, Polish noblewomen and Jewish women, balaguls and melameds, merchants and tenants, rich and poor, public figures and philanthropists, educated people and students. Putting them together creates a multi-colored mosaic: a fascinating picture of wandering life opens before the reader, the stage for which was villages and remote villages in Belarus, towns and cities in Poland and Russia (Bialystok, Grodno, Brest, Kharkov) and crowded capitals (Warsaw, Kyiv, Moscow). Kotik's memoirs are not only an outstanding work of memoir literature in Yiddish and an important cultural and historical document, they make a significant contribution to the study of the Jewish shtetl. It is no longer nostalgia seasoned with guilt, nor a critical paternalistic position, but an attempt to understand in all its complexity one of the fundamental phenomena in new Jewish history, a phenomenon that played a decisive role in the fate and lives of millions of Eastern European Jews.