Delves into the author's ancestry, providing a partial slice of Russian Jewish history. It then offers an individual perspective on what it meant to grow up in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of WWII. It also gives a personal account of the rise and development of Jewish national awareness, and describes a struggle for the immigration to Israel in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. "Thanksgiving All Year Round is most appropriately named. It is the buoyant saga of an incorrigible optimist. Nothing daunted, Shapiro first flings himself against the all-powerful Soviet regime by which he is made to feel a misfit and then against the red-tape and apparent idiosyncrasies of the free societies to which he has escaped and where he is determined to make good. Written by a person with an obvious literary flair, Shapiro's book provides manifestly authentic details of everyday life in the intellectual milieu of Moscow after Stalin and will be read avidly by students of Soviet society and of the Soviet Jewish movement."