In spiritual turmoil unrelieved by the catharsis of reconciliation with God, Bergen-Belsen survivor Chaim Fogel struggles toward death. But this inventive novel leavens the bitter story of his plight with scenes marked by gallows humour: the annual survivors' banquet at a ritzy New York hotel; the engagement of his daughter to a black man (a professor like Fogel himself) and their subsequent black-and-white wedding;