On his 80th birthday, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) created the most beautiful birthday present for himself: the memories of his youth in the Jewish milieu in the still quiet Berlin of the early 20th century. In the style of a chronicler, calm, confident, cheerful, witty, every sentence saturated with facts, he describes his background and childhood, his family, the fate of the four very different brothers, encounters with the young man’s journey from Berlin to Jerusalem with detours to Jena, Bern, Munich and Frankfurt.