Rather than going in search of his Jewish roots, Sandro Gerbi focuses on the reverse process: the gradual secularization of his family during the twentieth century, through the progressive distancing from religious observance, Jewish communal life and endogamy. Following the travels, achievements and vicissitudes of two generations, the author explores collective and personal history without nostalgia, but also without any contempt for his ancestry.

The story begins in 1938, the year in which the author’s father, the historian and economist Antonello Gerbi, was forced to leave Italy for Peru because of racial laws. The fate of his two brothers — one a sports journalist, the other a doctor — who found shelter in the United States, was similar. With his agile writing, rich in anecdotes, Gerbi traces the ‘Jewish’ thread in the events of his life: his birth in Peru in 1943 because of his father’s exile, the return to Italy in ’48, the survival of a specific “family lexicon,” and a trip to Israel in December 1967. He recounts some decisive meetings: the financial expert Renato Cantoni, the philosopher György Lukács, the journalists Ugo Stille and Indro Montanelli, the literary agent Erich Linder. Finally, the moving first return to Lima in 2010, 62 years after leaving.