The year is 1949, and Nora Gratz, a prickly, strong-willed survivor of the Holocaust, has just walked off the boat in Haifa accompanied by her German daughter-in-law, Louisa. Nora expects to be met by the Zionist cousin she has loved since they were children in Hungary, but when he fails to appear, the women enter an absorption camp for new immigrants to await an uncertain future.How will they fit into this new nation, which does not believe in looking back? Louisa the German is a genius at self-reinvention, in many ways the perfect Israeli. Nora the survivor continues to search for her cousin who may not want to be found, and responds to her new home with a cranky and ironic distance that rises like a wall of barbed wire. What does she protect behind that wall? The past, and its secrets. Read Less