It is an exploration of the many forms of corruption in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and embeds historical events, such as the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, among fictional stories concerning the Holocaust, Nazi careerism and the rise of Nazism.
The book starts with a story about some municipal workmen who are tasked to remove a statue of the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn from the roof of the Prague Academy of Music.
[1] The book continues with a collection of interlinked stories about Jewish life in Czechoslovakia during the war, including a tale similar to Anne Frank's.
The stories of most of the characters end unhappily, with the exception of Richard Reisinger (effectively the protagonist) whose fate we do not explicitly or implicitly learn.
It was reprinted in 2011 by Daunt Books with a foreword by Philip Roth which was originally written for and accompanies the translation of Weil's novel Life with a Star.