The book is a nonlinear, intensely personal family narrative told by Yaron Ashkenazi, who tries to reconstruct the life of his father, Haim Yosef Ashkenazi, and the damage that Haim inflicted on everyone closest to him. The chronology constantly jumps between Yaron’s childhood, his father’s criminal trial, his mother’s later illness and death, and a final encounter with his father sixteen years after the trial. Yaron also openly admits that some parts of his reconstruction consist of memories, guesses, imagined possibilities, and things that might have happened, so the book deliberately refuses to make every remembered scene objectively certain. The following summary therefore describes what the book itself presents, without treating Yaron’s admitted inventions as independently verified facts. The story begins during Haim’s trial in the Tel Aviv District Court. Yaron is still an adolescent, sitting beside his mother, Ahuva, while witness after witness describes how Haim persuaded people to entrust him with their savings and then destroyed them financially. Ahuva is large, loud, funny, coarse, affectionate and desperately loyal. She even chooses a dress that she hopes will distract Judge Margolis, and for a while she and Yaron survive the humiliation by turning the judge into a private joke and inventing childish expressions together. But outside the courtroom Yaron has become “the son of the thief.” Boys at school torment him, and older pupils drag him into the science room and tie him face-to-face to the school skeleton, Alex, until his beloved teacher Neta rescues him. Ahuva responds by declaring that he will no longer attend school. The trial itself becomes increasingly brutal. One elderly victim, Mr. Stein, who says Haim took his German reparations money, hurls his walking stick at Haim and splits his forehead. Haim barely reacts and refuses treatment. Other witnesses describe pensions and life savings that disappeared after Haim promised extraordinary returns. Throughout most of the proceedings he remains almost completely silent, diminished and withdrawn, while Ahuva and Yaron struggle to maintain the belief that he has been misunderstood.
As adult Yaron tells the story, the trial opens into the history of his parents’ marriage. Haim and Ahuva were profoundly mismatched. Ahuva is a special-education teacher, intellectually curious, multilingual, idealistic, superstitious, physically expressive and emotionally direct. Haim is thin, physically frail-looking, extraordinarily verbal, inventive, jealous, sarcastic, controlling and capable of emotional cruelty. Their marriage contains genuine attraction and moments of exuberant family happiness, but it is also a system of mutual torment. Haim invents private names for everyone and everything, imposes peculiar rules on the household and constantly tests Ahuva. He can dance with her, make the whole family laugh or carry young Yaron around the apartment on his back, then suddenly humiliate her with an insulting nickname or a precisely chosen cruel remark. Ahuva sometimes answers his psychological aggression with actual physical violence, slapping or hitting him. One of the most devastating episodes occurs when Haim casually announces that he has had a vasectomy, supposedly to preserve the perfect “rare togetherness” of the three of them. Ahuva, who has not agreed to this decision, experiences it as a betrayal. Yaron grows up less as a child protected from his parents’ marriage than as its obsessive observer. He listens to their fights and their sex through the apartment’s thin walls and becomes fascinated by their contradictory mixture of desire, coercion, disgust, dependence and love. His childhood imagination fills with frightening figures he calls the “Tourette wolves.” Obscene messages written by strangers in library books order him from page to page, and although they terrify him, he discovers in himself a disturbing pleasure in surrendering to arbitrary commands. This mixture of fear, obedience, secrecy and desire becomes one of the central patterns of his life.
The book gradually reveals that Yaron was also unknowingly involved in his father’s financial activities. Haim works at a bank while simultaneously operating in coffee futures. He buys contracts for coffee that does not yet exist and becomes successful when disasters in coffee-producing regions drive prices upward. Around this legitimate-looking financial world grows something much darker. Haim persuades clients to give him money for supposedly brief, safe arrangements that will provide unusually high returns. He speaks of major companies needing temporary capital, offshore banks and transactions that ordinary clients cannot fully understand. He is charming, remembers everyone’s circumstances and often visits people at home. Yaron sometimes accompanies him, apparently helping reassure clients simply by being Haim’s son. More important is a secret game Haim plays with him while they pace through the apartment. Haim calls out enormous strings of numbers and Yaron, who has an extraordinary memory for them, learns to connect the sums with clients’ names. He becomes a living archive. Only much later does he understand the meaning of the phrase Haim whispered to him as though it were an exotic foreign expression: “ein ti’ud” — there is no documentation. Haim has arranged matters so that the records are stored orally in his son. When the police finally arrive during dinner to arrest him, Haim briefly seems transformed into the wolf-like creature Yaron has always sensed inside him. He tells Ahuva that it is over. She replies that justice is on their side and that he only wanted to do good, although the later trial makes that faith increasingly impossible to sustain.
