Growing up, the author often recalled two objects from his childhood: a 19th C. B&W photograph of a distinguished rabbinic figure who, he was told, was a distant relative and a straw-colored book cover, 'In Praise of Wisdom' by Jakob Klatzkin, prominently situated in a vitrine in his grandmother's Manhattan apartment. As the decades passed while he lived, worked and raised a family in Nepal, he still wondered who were these two dignified men and what was their physical, even intellectual, relationship to him? Unfolding their lives and researching their lineage through his maternal ancestry revealed not only the European roots of his American family, including a friendship with Einstein in Berlin in the 1920s, as well as family relationships that stretched around the globe, including those who never escaped the traumas of the 20th Century and those who made new lives in the new world.

Keith Leslie was born in Newfoundland, Canada in 1954, raised in Central NY, studied philosophy and religion at Amherst College in western MA, worked in the US Senate after college, then went to travel around the world in 1978 for six months with his best friend from college, and didn't return to live in the US until Covid struck in March 2020. He spent 37 years living and working in Kathmandu, Nepal, for Save the Children US on education and public health programs covering the Himalaya and then Asia; with UNDP leading community outreach for the drafting a new constitution after the Maoist rebellion and end of the Shah monarchy; then on local government accountability with the World Bank. He currently lives in Santa Fe, NM.