At times a comedy of terrors, pitting the severe pogrom pain of one side of our narrator’s family against the other’s imagined holocaust horrors in a contest of who suffered more, the consequences are deadly serious: when long-ago traumas trigger ones even more devastating for our protagonist, his fantastic schemes of vengeance and gallows humor can barely conceal his mad despair. Weaving tales of comic misfortune and heartbreaking tragedy, this is part detective story, part probe into one family’s edifice of unhappiness. From past to present, Odessa to Sarajevo to Montreal, New York, Hollywood and Gaza, our storyteller straddles the tightrope between laughter and tears, between succumbing to tragedy and finding ways to transcend it.