Like the renowned American writer Edmund Wilson, who began to learn Hungarian at the age of 65, Richard Teleky started his study of that difficult language as an adult. Unlike Wilson, he is a third-generation Hungarian American with a strong desire to understand how his ethnic background has affected the course of his life. He writes with clarity, perception, and humor about a subject of importance to many North Americans - reconciling their contemporary identity with a heritage from another country.

But more than a collection of essays on ethnicity by a talented writer, the book is structured to share with the reader insights on language, literature, art, and community from a cultural perspective.

The book is also unified by the author's attention to certain concerns, including the meaning of multiculturalism, the power of a language to shape one's thinking, the persistence of anti-Semitism, the significance of displacement and nostalgia in emigration, the importance of understanding the past, the need for a narrative tradition in the writing of fiction, and the power of books in Central Europe.

Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the book makes a contribution to several fields: Central European and Hungarian studies; North American immigrant and ethnic studies; contemporary literature; comparative literature; and popular culture.