A wise old woman living amid silence and books. A embittered communist living out her days in a shelter in Erail. A forty-year-old American woman — seemingly prosperous, yet crippled by memories. A German woman working near Haifa in a Christian community in atonement for her homeland's guilt. A Catholic nun, now an Orthodox priest's wife, who found herself in the Holy Land. An unstable teenage Israeli radical, a sad Arab Christian, a specialist in Judaica. Private life and high politics. The USA, Russia, Israel, Lithuania, Poland… And at the center of this disparate, yet still desperately united world, is a Jew — once a mole in the Gestapo, a partisan, and now a Catholic priest. His life explains how people are still alive to this day, how they did not drown themselves in pain and hatred.
Ulitskaya's novel is about the wandering of the spirit in the darkness of this world, about how a person seeks and finds light within and around themselves. About Daniel Rufeisen — a man whose life literature itself cannot rival.