Suffer the children: dashing, ambitious Hillel Svoboda, the intelligent, free-thinking humanist Lael Lassalle, and the beautiful Natanya Jacobi - the next generation who paid for the sins of their fathers and the sins of their father's fathers and the sins of their father's father's fathers ... and so it goes. This story is a passport to a uniquely rich part of Jewish civilization. It is a historic saga that reveals the dynamics of a family torn apart by envy, love, and hate. It is liberally sprinkled with Yiddish that you don't have to be Jewish to get It might leave you asking: Did our ancestors leave us hardly more than our genes and a BREADCRUMB TRAIL of their existence? It is the tale of shtetel-dwellers in Russia in the nineteenth century, but it could take place anywhere yesterday, today, or perhaps tomorrow - no matter the people's nationality, no matter their religion, no matter their differences, as long as there is prejudice and hatred and the element of human nature, and until those who seek to destroy us are vanquished from the face of the earth, history is known to repeat itself.