The novella takes the form of an exegesis meant to interpret The Border, a lost text by the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth.
Organized as a set of fragmentary manuscripts from The Border, the story initially chronicles events in the life of Jacob Pliniak, an Eastern European rabbi and owner of a roadside tavern.
As he flees a pogrom and resettles in the United States, reality shifts and so does Jacob.
Joseph Roth did write a text called Die Grenze (The Border).
The work appeared in 1919 and belonged to Roth’s journalistic production and has little to do with what Bellatin describes in Jacob the Mutant.