This nov­el tells the sto­ry of Isaac Jacob Blu­men­feld, an aver­age Jew­ish boy, smarter then he seems, who lives in a small town near Lvov. Through Isaac’s sto­ry, the book relates the his­to­ry of Jew­ish life and tragedy in the 20th cen­tu­ry. At the same time, the sto­ry is inter­wo­ven with Yid­dish folk­tales, jokes, and philo­soph­i­cal asides. As the own­er­ship of the town changes with its polit­i­cal for­tunes, Isaac is first a cit­i­zen of Aus­tro-Hun­gary, then of Poland, the Sovi­et Union, Nazi Ger­many, and final­ly the Sovi­et Union again. He sur­vives the absur­di­ty and hor­ror of East­ern Europe by play­ing the fool, stum­bling from one adven­ture to the next. In between the wars, he mar­ries his sweet­heart, so that by the time World War II begins, he is a mature man with a fam­i­ly, whom he inad­ver­tent­ly sends to a spa town that is invad­ed by the Ger­mans. This is the tale’s entry to the Holo­caust; how­ev­er it is relat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly than in oth­er books about this peri­od. Through­out the book Isaac relies inter­mit­tent­ly on the wise coun­sel of his dear friend, a rab­bi who was the chair­man of the town’s Athe­ists’ Club and who sus­tains Isaac through the two world wars, three con­cen­tra­tion camps, and five moth­er­lands. This is a unique book. It is a record of the cen­tral sto­ry of the Jews of East­ern Europe of the last 100 years, yet it is filled with Jew­ish sar­cas­tic humor and jokes, and con­tains many nuggets of wisdom.