In 1987 Theo Richmond, an English-born Jew, decided to take a six-month sabbatical to write a book - his first. It took him seven years. It began as a subject that excited his curiosity. It became an obsession. Eventually it took over his life. A blend of personal memoir, oral history and biography, a story of lives caught up in the sweep of history, the resulting book encompasses the Holocaust in an illuminating and original way. Richmond's search was for a lost community, one that had vanished along with members of his family. Since his early childhood in London, he had heard his relatives mention a place called Konin, the Polish shtetl from which both his parents came. He felt an irresistible urge to find out more about this small town and its Jewish community, to place on record something of what the Nazis had destroyed and thus to remember. Everywhere he hunted for elusive clues that might lead him to this lost world. He searched for its few survivors, scattered in many lands. Starting with one old man in London, he traced others, not only in Britain, but in Brooklyn, Florida, Texas, Minnesota, Nebraska, on a kibbutz in Israel, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and elsewhere .