Content warning: This novel discusses the Holocaust, war, suicide, and violent war crimes.

Josef is a 13-year-old Jewish boy living in Germany in the 1930s. His life is turned upside down on the night when Nazi Brownshirts take his father away to a concentration camp. Even though Josef’s father is later restored to the family, he’s traumatized. During his family’s ocean voyage to Cuba, Josef struggles to assume the responsibility of being a grown man in place of his father. His bar mitzvah marks the end of his childhood and the beginning of making difficult decisions to protect his family. He therefore experiences Coming of Age in a Humanitarian Crisis. He eventually sacrifices his own life so that his little sister Ruthie can live, a plot point through which Gratz suggests that children living through crises have to grow up too fast. The novel never portrays Josef choosing to save Ruthie, and it only reveals this in the final chapter, lending a mythical quality to acts of heroism in wartime.

Josef’s father returns from a concentration camp traumatized. He tries to throw himself overboard in Havana Harbor and is taken to a Cuban hospital, never to see his family again.