Through the story of three generations of a Jewish family, the Karnowskys, this novel, originally published in 1943, offers us an extraordinary fresco of the first half of the 20th century. David, the patriarch, who at the dawn of the century leaves the Polish shtetl where he was born to settle in Berlin, will encourage his son Georg to adapt and become "a Jew among Jews and a German among Germans." Georg will become a respectable Berlin doctor and thus embody the height of the family's integration and social success. His son Yegor, born during Nazism and deeply marked by anti-Semitism, will land in an inhospitable New York and culminate the eventful destiny of his lineage. In this work, Singer not only wrote pages of unusual beauty, but also glimpsed with overwhelming clairvoyance the fate of the Jews after World War II, confirming, despite himself, the prophetic capacity that only a...read more
