To say Alex has had it rough is an under­state­ment. His father’s gone, his moth­er is strug­gling with addic­tion, and he’s now liv­ing with an aunt and uncle who are less than excit­ed to have him. Almost every­one treats him as though he doesn’t mat­ter at all, as though he’s noth­ing. So when a kid at school actu­al­ly tells him he’s noth­ing, Alex snaps, and gets vio­lent. For­tu­nate­ly, his social work­er is able to pull some strings and get him a job at a nurs­ing home for the sum­mer rather than being sent to juvie. There he meets two peo­ple who will help him see his life in a very dif­fer­ent way. The most impor­tant of these is Josey, the 107-year-old Holo­caust sur­vivor who stopped both­er­ing to talk years ago. Against all odds, Josey and Alex form a bond, and so Josey decides that Alex is worth telling his life sto­ry to. Day by day, as Alex comes to his room with meals or just to vis­it, Josey parcels out his tale of being a young Jew­ish man in Ger­many: how he fell in love with a girl and learned to sew, and how that same girl and his sewing skills would save his life in the face of unimag­in­able loss­es. And then there’s Maya-Jade, the grand­daugh­ter of one of the res­i­dents with an overblown sense of impor­tance. If Alex feels like he’s noth­ing, Maya-Jade feels like she’s all that. Unlike Alex, she believes that peo­ple care about what she thinks, and that she can make a dif­fer­ence. With the help of both Josey and Maya-Jade, Alex is ulti­mate­ly able to appre­ci­ate the fact that he, too, does mat­ter. And that he can also make a dif­fer­ence — a good dif­fer­ence — in the world. And with this new aware­ness, he is final­ly able to rise to the occa­sion of his own life.