Rafał Feliks Buszejkin was not your typical Polish Jew of the 1930s. He was born in Warsaw in 1912 to a bourgeois Jewish family that left Warsaw in 1914 for Moscow to escape the Germans, and then returned to Warsaw in 1917 to escape the Bolsheviks.

Based on a memoir he wrote for his daughter late in his life (his manuscript is now at the YIVO archive), her new book, Stories My Father Told Me, is the refreshing account of an atypical Eastern European Jew of the early 20th century -- a man who boxed, raced bicycles, rode horses, failed his last year of high school, studied medicine in France and agronomy in Algeria, lived in six countries, spoke five languages, but preferred to swear in Russian.

As a Jewish teenager in Warsaw in 1930, he played poker and hooky with a band of truants and failed his last year of high school; in Algeria in 1933, he spent time with a community of Sephardic Jews in a small desert town and established a Maccabi sports club; he was a young Jewish agronomist who, exiled to Kazakhstan during the war, was put in charge of the agriculture of five kolkhozes and slept in a yurt; and as a Jewish refugee after the war, he spent six months on the French Riviera, then lived for two years in a Jewish farming collective in Sosua, Dominican Republic. That is where the author was born

Unlike the majority of Holocaust survivor stories, Felek, as everyone called him, never spent any time in a German camp. He left Poland, heading for Russian-controlled territory just a few days after the German invasion and spent the war years in Siberia and Kazakhstan. It was while living in Kazakhstan that the cover photo of the author’s mother was taken. Surprisingly, many people do not know that there were approximately 200,000 Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust because they escaped and were trapped in the Soviet Union for the duration of the war. The description of life during that relatively neglected chapter of Jewish and Holocaust history is told in engaging detail. This is also a story of “survivor hood.”