My Holy Grail Search for Happiness at Any and All Cost

We all have our challenges in life.

Immigrants have some unusual challenges, some would say.

This author is the son of a war refugee.

He has already written about his mother.

Now, he discusses the story of how two refugees were of great impact on this author. Crucial, in fact.

A refugee who was a Jew and an unusual psychoanalyst, and a refugee who was a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

They were able to share a key insight or two that changed his life. Insights he was not able to garner from any American-born person, even if in the highest echelons of a variety of fields.

Other people simply could not "walk in his shoes". They tried and tried and tried.

In 1939, there was a knock on the door of this author's mother:

"You have twenty-four hours to leave. The Russians are coming."

Their village was nine miles from the border with Ukraine, and this is a point where the Russians entered Poland.

So they fled: on a wagon drawn by horse.

But they were intercepted, incorrectly assessed to be Russians, and put on a train and deported to Russia.

Their mother, with a sixth-grade education, was smart, though. They hid behind bushes during a brief stop, and when everyone was called to reboard, they did not reboard, for they were hiding behind bushes.

They begged for potato peels as they made their way across Poland, keeping out of harm's way. Farmers took them in, because their mother, a farmer before the war, was such a hard worker and of good attitude.

This book discusses his journey as a series of stepping-stones. He believes no one has all the answers.

A variety of fascinating people are discussed in this book.