Journeys is a combination of autobiography and history of the author’s family. The autobiography has a “deep structure” dealing with the perennial struggle of conscience over expediency, and between principle and self-interest. In this connection, the book describes the bureaucracies that the author has battled, interspersed with stories of the many troubled individuals that the author befriended and to whom he provided non-intrusive and invaluable guidance. This is all done without self-congratulation; in fact, he gives himself various pseudonyms as he relates these stories.

My own relationship to the author is not described in the book, but those that are reported are highly representative of it. Here it is impossible not to interpose a personal account of what Sam meant to me. I too was an orphan. My mother was institutionalized when I was ten. My father was unable to care for a grieving and desperately unhappy pre-adolescent. After family members gave up on me, I was deposited on the doorstep of the Pride of Judea Children’s home, where Sam Arcus was a counselor. Sam, a caring and dedicated mentor, taught us all that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” and he encouraged us to get all the education we could for that journey. He shared what he was learning as a part-time college student, and although I believed it to be far beyond my capacity to achieve, he gave me the longing for knowledge that ultimately would lead me to a Ph.D. and a deeply satisfying academic career. At twelve years old, I felt I had only one true friend, and that friend was Sam.

At age sixteen, in early 1944, I joined the wartime merchant marine. Sam and I had many conversations about the wisdom of that decision prior to its implementation. I hear echoes of those discussions in several chapters of the book. For instance, one chapter deals with a family contemplating and pursuing conversion from Catholicism to Judaism, and another is about a frightened, lonely and bewildered youngster who had been through them all -- counselors, social workers, parole officers, cops â€" without relief. Among the many reasons the author is able to help where others fail is that he never forgot the loneliness, bewilderment and fright from his own childhood and adolescence.

The earlier book, Deja Views, told of Sam’s own experiences as an orphan at the Hebrew National Orphan Home, and as a counselor at the Pride of Judea. Journeys contains historical accounts of Sam’s family in Russia, explaining how he came to HNOH, and autobiographical accounts of his career as a social worker and administrator of various Jewish Community Centers in the United States. (Never mind the pseudonyms; all the characters are Sam.) The family history is fascinating, giving the reader a glimpse into the true meaning of the phrase, “The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray.” As the son of a relatively prosperous Jewish horse breeder in Russia, Sam’s father Nochem came to the United States with plans to bring his wife Basha and two young children along as soon as he had the means to do so. However, his younger sister was involved with a non-Jewish Army officer, and the scandalized family agreed that he should bring her to the New World first, using the papers he had obtained for his wife. His children would not leave Russia without their mother, and so Nathan’s sister came alone.

Then came World War I. Nathan’s wife and children fled a pogrom and, believing they were dead, Nathan married Sam’s mother Mollie. They had two children together before they learned that Basha and Nathan’s children had in fact survived. The financial burden of supporting Nathan’s two families, and the unfortunate accidental death of Nathan and Mollie’s first-born, plunged Mollie into a depression from which she never recovered. She died in a fall from a building that may or may not have been suicide, and that is how Sam came to be a ward of the HNOH.

These stories are told with warmth, sensitivity and an occasional dash of humor. Even those who were the villains in young Sam’s life are given a voice to tell their version of the truth. The story of a family torn asunder by its cultural placement, its own values (even if self-destructive), and the inexorable march of history is rich and textured.

Next is an account of Sam’s journey from 1940 to today. Sam’s goodness has never tarnished. He has consistently maintained the values he shared with his orphaned charges as a youth, and has never sacrificed integrity for expediency. No human institution is perfect; all serve the needs of the people who staff them whether or not these needs are congruent with the institutional mission. Sam always tried to do what he believed he had been hired to do, and not surprisingly, this resulted in an employment history that did not progress on a smooth and straight line. He encountered men whose wealth and power substituted for learning and talent. He ran up on the political rocks of organizations whose rifts were there long before he arrived. But through it all, Sam never lost his belief that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, he never stopped working to improve social institutions and he never stopped counseling troubled young people to take that first step. His relatively newly-minted career as an author show that his own Journey is far from over.