Peter Mosskin is the author of more than a dozen books, including works dealing with the student revolution of the 1960s; texts about Jacques Brel and the Swedish folk singer Cornelis Vreeswijk, demonstrating Mosskin’s lifelong interest in music; travel writings; and a group of novels. The excerpt presented is the opening section of the third novel in an interconnected but also somewhat freestanding family trilogy. For the first two volumes, Skänk åt den fege en hingst (Give the coward a horse, 1994) and Glöm inte bort att jag finns (Don’t forget that I exist, 1998), Mosskin received the Vi Literature Prize (1994) and the Ivar Lo Prize (1999). These novels trace the adventures of his paternal forefathers in a violent twentieth century that saw this line of his family flee from tsarist Russia to the poor emigrant section of Stockholm. In the third novel (2000), Petja, the son of a Russian Jewish emigrant with illusions of a glorious background and a Swedish mother who has to deal with reality, pieces together the puzzle of his childhood through the fragmented voices of several witnesses. At a later point in the novel, Petja realizes that the idyllic Norwegian family life described here was actually infiltrated by Nazism. Gradually he begins to understand why he is not quite the same as the other kids, eventually realizing that he must go away to try to find himself, first to study in France and then to work on a kibbutz in Israel.