As he struggles with the tiny Fiat's gearbox and Gdansk's traffic, Pawel, the narrator, entertains his driving instructor with stories of his grandparents before the war and of his father in the 1970s, centered on their ownership of Mercedes-Benz cars--the outings, the races, the crashes, and the inevitable repairs. Based on fact and illustrated with personal photographs, these tales contrast the golden era of Poland's prewar independence with the...