After the end of World War I, Gabriel Dan finds himself in a small Polish town. There, he lives in a hotel populated by a colorful assortment of castaways - soldiers, bankrupts, communists, aspiring artists, and loose women. No one knows what the future holds, but everyone is waiting for the legendary billionaire Bloomfield, who is supposed to arrive from America. No other writer has depicted the doomed world of the old monarchies and the rocky path into the new era as intensely and vividly as Joseph Roth.