On the eve of World War II, Viennese businessman Felix Katz feels only rage and intolerance for observant Jews. When conventional methods fail to cure his daughter's emotional illness, however, Felix reluctantly agrees to travel with his family to the Carpathian Mountains in search of a famous healer. Months later, after being snowbound in a rural Jewish village that sustains itself on faith, Felix returns to a Vienna, and in this 1990 novel by Aaron Appelfeld (1932-2018), he must undergo a personal reckoning when he finds the city plagued by a violent wave of anti-Semitism.