The Kahans from Baku is the saga of a Russian Jewish family. Their story provides an insight into the history of Jews in the Imperial Russian economy, especially in the oil industry. The entrepreneur and family patriarch, Chaim Kahan, was a pious and enlightened man and a Zionist. His children followed in his footsteps in business as well as in politics, philanthropy, and love of books. The book takes us through their forced migration in times of war, revolution, and the twentieth century's totalitarian regimes, telling the story of fortune and misfortune of one cohesive family over four generations through Russia, Germany, Denmark, and France, and finally on to Palestine and the United States of America.

We live in a historical end-time that erases the legacy of the nineteenth century in all areas of social and individual life. Our epoch at the turn of two centuries has come to an end and there are many indications that the twentieth century will not be a continuation but the reversal of the nineteenth. ... So I want my memories to be understood as materials for the history of my time, a story of the intellectual struggles at the beginning of this era and the political struggles at its end. "Simon Dubnow 1934Simon Dubnow's book of life comprises three parts, which in three Volumes are published. Volume 1 brings to mind childhood and youth, the apprenticeship years and the beginning of journalistic work such as historical research in Petersburg and Odessa in the years 1860 to 1903. In it Dubnow describes traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe and the dawn of modernity.