Where were you, Robert? - Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Robert, fifteen, can travel through time due to a curious property in his eye-sight which he can't control. As he looks at a picture his vision blurs and he enters the scene he's looking at - e.g. a glimpse of a TV documentary takes him back to the Stalinist Soviet Union. Soon Robert is adrift in history,
falling into picture after picture, never sure where he will emerge. Each time he discovers a new life, further and further from the one in which he belongs, further from home and his mother's kitchen where it all began. Finally he finds himself in seventeenth century Amsterdam and can only escape by painting a picture from memory, a picture of his kitchen back home.