I came to this book expecting it to be a memoir, or at least the author's story of how he and his family made aliyah, how they came to that decision, and what life was like for them while they were still new citizens. Instead I found the book to be about the author's experiences with and opinions on a wide variety of topics, like the Black Hebrews, the Bedouins, the Israeli school system, his periodic service in the military, and revisiting his boyhood neighbourhood in the Bronx. Some of them, like the ones on the Black Hebrews and the school system, I found more interesting than others (I wasn't that interested in the chapters on the Hispanic-Americans' visit to Israel or the poet Maxime Kumin, for example). I'm not sure how to classify this book; it's not written like a memoir, certainly doesn't read like an aliyah tract, and I wouldn't call it a collection of essays either because they're on the one hand too personal to be essays only, yet on the other hand go from topic to topic without being centered around one specific theme or time period. The book starts out very interestingly, with the author talking about how he and his wife thought they were being original when they named their firstborn Jennifer in 1965, only to their dismay and shock to discover there were many other Jennifers in her kindergarten class; the introduction closes by saying that their third- and fourth-born, Yishai and Miriam, are also far from being the only ones in their classes answering to those names, but this time Mr. Chertok and his wife (whom I've discovered he's since divorced) are neither surprised nor dismayed. And it really starts out reading like it's going to be a personal memoir of how the family made aliyah, or at least Mr. Chertok's memoirs of his life up till then. So it was kind of suprising when it quickly turned into a collection of personal recollections on a variety of topics, more like essays than real memoirs.The writing style isn't overly complicated or boring, though I found some of the essays more relevant and interesting than others. And some of the information contained within is now dated or different; these events took place during the Eighties after all, and a lot about Israeli society has changed since then. I'm giving it four stars because, while the material was for the most part good, it's not the type of book that someone would probably be interested in reading unless s/he was already very interested in this subject. It's not for laypeople. And the arrangement of the essays also wasn't entirely to my agreement, coupled with how it's difficult to describe exactly what type of book it's supposed to be--essay, personal reflection, political tract, memoir, or a hybrid of those subjects.