Arved Ojamaa Ashby was born in Estonia on the Finnish Sea on August 8, 1922. Soviet armed forces brutally occupied his home country in 1940, and a carefree and idyllic life gave way to a time of uncertainty, fear, and death. He evaded the Russian draft in 1941 before he joined the military forces that liberated his home country. In 1943, he started his medical studies at the University of Tartu in Estonia. He fled to Finland to escape the German military draft, and fought the Russians as part of the Finnish army. Ashby moved with his young family to Wisconsin, where he opened his medical practice in 1960, at the Sheboygan Clinic. He retired in December 1989, having delivered thousands of babies.This book, a reprint of the two memoirs Capful of Wind and The Wind at my Back, tells Ashby’s traumatic but ultimately successful story – a coming of age story, and a story of emigration and survival. It is an immigrant story like no other.