Right at the beginning of the novel, André Kaminski reflects on the past of his protagonist: The longing to lead a "first-hand life" has driven Gideon Esdur Kiebitz, a young Jew, to take the leap from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century a few years after World War II: to emigrate to Poland and build a new society there with like-minded individuals, a world of equality and brotherhood, free from misery and oppression. However, after all these years, little remains of that utopia. Now, older and wiser, he resides in Vienna, far from the island of his dreams, alone and speechless - fate has taken away his voice. Can a doctor help him?.