When Jakov Lind's American editor suggested in 1969 that he write an autobiography, Lind had reservations. He was, he explained to his editor, a writer of fiction, and “[what] a writer of fiction has to say about himself, his text makes clear” (Cr, 43). His collection of stories Eine Seele aus Holz (1962) and the novels Landschaft in Beton (1963) and Eine bessere Welt (1966) had created a certain stir in literary circles: while his works were, as he put it, “crushed … with a thud” by German and Austrian critics (Cr, 165), their English translations were received with enthusiasm by English and American critics. Despite Lind's initial reluctance, he recognized that an autobiography could afford him an opportunity “to look at [himself] from behind the image [he had] cultivated: writer, foreigner, cosmopolitan, Casanova, coffee-house bohemian, anti-intellectual intellectual” (Cr, 209). It would also be Lind's first work in English: “[The] autobiography I loathed starting,” he reflects, “would, to keep the subject at a distance, have to be written in English” (Cr, 217).

The product of this resolution is a three-part autobiography. Two of its volumes were written shortly after Lind returned to England with a contract to write his memoirs. Counting My Steps was published in 1969 and recounts Lind's childhood in Vienna, his escape to Holland after the Anschluss in 1938, and his extraordinary survival of the war under an assumed identity. Numbers (1972) charts Lind's wanderings after the war, as he tries, and fails, to find his place first in Palestine and Israel, then in Europe.