"First edition published 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc."--Title page verso.

Issued as part of UPCC book collections on Project MUSE.

Prologue -- 1. Beginnings -- 2. Golden days -- 3 The eight days -- 4. Malheurs -- 5. Muses -- 6. Eggs -- 7. The graduate -- 8. Hallowed halls -- 9. Again through new eyes -- 10. Rebirths -- 11. She and I -- 12. Kafka's fathers -- Epilogue I : Haifa, Israel, December 1996 -- Epilogue II : Jackson Heights, Queens, March 1999 -- Postscript.

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Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, Michael Blumenthal discovers that she was not his biological mother, and that his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents. As fate would have it, his adoptive father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his stepson a fate uncannily--and terrifyingly--similar to his own: Having first adopted Michael, in part, to help his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he himself had had to survive. With these revelations, the "mysteries" that seem to have permeated Michael's childhood are laid bare, triggering a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life.

Description based on print version record.