Through the story of three generations of a Jewish family, the Karnowskys, this novel, originally published in 1943, offers us an extraordinary fresh of the first half of the 20th century. David, the patriarch, who at the dawn of the century leaves the Polish shtetl where he was born to settle in Berlin, will encourage his son Georg to adapt and become a "Jew among Jews and a German among Germans." Georg will become a respectable Berlin doctor and thus embody the pinnacle of family integration and social success. His son Yegor, born during Nazism and deeply marked by anti-Semitism, will land...