As he pulled up and shut down the engine, he took a deep breath to calm himself, and in that instant, the flash of anger he had felt the night he was torn from his mother returned. He shook it from his mind, slid out of the seat, and went up the stairs to the front door. Ida opened the door and threw her arms around his neck with exactly the same loving abandonment he had seen her often leap into his father's arms so many years ago. She hung onto her boy, hung on tight with her face buried in his shoulder and sobbed. He wrapped his arms around her tiny waist, fighting hard for control. He couldn't help himself. Her tears and unrestrained love swept away his resistance. He stood up straight, lifting her off her feet. They stood there, mother and grown son, in the open doorway, holding each other in an endless embrace as their tears rained down. Ida's life reveals the story of an incredibly resilient human being born in a Boston ghetto in the late 1870s who fights to survive, educate herself, and protect her family in the midst of the rampant political and social corruption of the early 1900s, the wide-open crime of mob violence of the Prohibition era, the economic destruction of the Great Depression, and the devastating tragedy brought on by the rise of Nazi Germany as it engulfs the world in the chaotic senselessness of World War II.