An award-winning actor on screen and stage ( The Defiant Ones , The African Queen , The Sound of Music , My Fair Lady , Fiddler on the Roof ), an activist for civil rights and progressive causes worldwide, and a singer whose voice has won him great applause, Theodore Bikel here tells his own compelling life story. Born in Austria, raised in Palestine, educated in England, and with a stellar career in the United States and around the world, Bikel offers a personal history parallel to momentous events of the twentieth century. In an eloquent, fiercely committed voice, he writes of the Third Reich, the birth of the State of Israel, the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, and the tumultuous 1960s in America. In a new postscript to this paperback edition, he looks at recent events in the Middle East and takes both sides to task for their excesses.

"A young Jewish boy strolls through Vienna and witnesses acts of anti-Semitism during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. At night he dreams of a superhero, Judah Maccabee, who appears to defend Vienna's Jews. When he awakes, he knows there will be no Maccabean rescue and he weeps. Years pass, the boy, now an old man, returns to Vienna and sees the Jewish community and the Temple have been restored. He looks for the eternal light in his Temple and can't find it. Then suddenly it becomes clear to him: The light was there all the time; it was in his own heart"--