Born in Łódź - the capital of the Polish textile industry - the Ashkenazi twins, Simja and Yankev, are as opposite as Cain and Abel. Simja, small, intelligent and calculating, is ready to achieve prosperity at any cost; Yankev, handsome and charming but not so cunning, is compassionate and tolerant. The arrival of industrialization, capitalism and the class struggle in the city will end up confronting them, and the forces of love and history will irrevocably separate them. With this masterful novel, comparable to those of Zola and Tolstoy, Singer reached narrative maturity by weaving the fate of his characters and the vicissitudes of history into a vivid recreation of the turbulent century from the advent of the Industrial Revolution to the Great War and the Russian Revolution.