In 1917, a teenage girl from a German settlement in Paraguay, a country impoverished by wars and government corruption, was forced to cede her baby boy to a yerba mate trader from the then booming Buenos Aires city. When the boy was nine, his foster father died, and the family descended into abject poverty. His foster mother made him take a meagerly paid job roaming the streets of Buenos Aires, searching for discarded bread to help support her and her older and preferred biological son, who could not hold a well-paid job. Lacking a true family or role model, he managed to self-educate and develop a strong sense of direction. He learned about his true origin and identity at age 19, when he succeeded in establishing contacts with government officials in Paraguay. The search for his mother and relatives brought him dramatic and unexpected results that he documented in detail.

Despite facing seemingly unsurmountable obstacles and setbacks, which included imprisonment and torture by a tyrant, he climbed to the middle-class ranks, married one of the daughters of Spanish immigrants who fled to Argentina when grape phylloxera wiped out their vineyards, and started a large family, ultimately becoming a successful bank executive and business owner. Upon his death In 1988, he left behind five accomplished professionals with indelible memories of their parents' sacrifices and unlikely achievements. The author captured remarkable life-story details while providing factual descriptions of life in a German settlement in Paraguay and a Spanish village in the early 1900s, along with the ever-changing political environment of Argentina throughout the lifetimes of the story's protagonists.