First published in Argentina in 1994, this novel is a detective story in which the police try to solve an assassination and a lost man tries to reconstruct his identity. These two searches are set against the story of four generations of a Jewish family, a social and cultural narrative that spans nearly a hundred years of cataclysmic events of the century including World War I, the Russian and Cuban revolutions, the birth of the state of Israel, and the military dictatorship in Argentina.
Identity - personal, cultural, historical - is the main theme of this novel, as is the experience of being "other."