'I was probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head.' From this first line, Dan Vittorio Segre's memoir moves from one startling turning point to the next. The child of aristocratic parents, Segre fled fascist Italy and Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws only to be thrust into the pioneering culture of Palestine, completely unprepared for the dangers of life there during World War II. Beautifully narrated, "Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew" is an ironic, philosophical meditation on the historical reverberations of the twentieth century.