Books in the Library of American Fiction series

Young Danny Meyer's bubble-like existence in paradisal Madison is broken when his father is stricken with illness. The family is forced to move to Milwaukee where they struggle at the brink of poverty. Here, Danny must accept the responsibilities of manhood while still struggling with adolescence.

Set before the Holocaust in the tiny Polish shtetl of Proszowice, each interconnected story follows the young protagonist through the pleasures and humiliations of childhood and rites of manhood, as he fights against historical, social and psychological forces that threaten to pull him down.