When Nathan Malkin returns to New York from premature retirement in Israel, he comes bearing a heavy baggage of memory -- insistent recollections of his parents' bitter marriage, of the tragic deaths of his wife and only son, and of his strange, guilt-ridden relationship with a deranged, now deceased brother, Nachman. Central to Malkin's schemes is The Stolen Jew, a famous novel he wrote many years back that tells the luminous, wonderfully melodramatic tale of a Jewish boy in Imperial Russia kidnapped from a shtetl to fulfill another boy's term of service in the czar's army.