[2] In Poland, approximately 70 years before the present, the 10-year-old Polish-Jewish Leopold (Leo) Gursky falls in love with his neighbor Alma Mereminski.
A short time after, the Germans invade Poland and Leo takes cover in the woods, living on roots, small animals, bugs and what he can steal from farmers' cellars.
After three and a half years of hiding, he goes to America and finds Alma but is shocked to hear she thought he had died in the war and had married the son of the manager of the factory she works at.
Leo regularly watches Isaac from a distance, wishing to be part of the boy's life but scared to come in contact with him.
In the present day, Leo is a lonely old man who waits for his death, along with his recently found childhood friend, Bruno, and Alma has been dead for five years.
In the past, a younger Leo wrote a letter to his old friend Zvi, asking for his manuscript of The History of Love to be returned to him.
However, his wife Rosa informs him that the book was destroyed in a flood, choosing to hide that her husband did not write The History of Love.
Her younger brother Bird, so called for jumping from the second story of a building hoping he could fly, seeks refuge in religion and believes himself to be one of God's chosen people, thus distancing himself from reality.
One day, her mother receives a letter from a mysterious man named Jacob Marcus who requests that she translate The History of Love from Spanish to English for $100,000, to be paid in increments of $25,000 as the work progresses.
She starts by noting down what she knows about Jacob Marcus in her diary, and concludes that the Alma in the book was real and proceeds to find her.
Isaac's brother calls Alma, after reading the note and the original manuscript of the book, to tell her that Gursky is the real author, but Bird answers the telephone and it confuses him even further.
To cleanse his sin of bragging and to regain the status as one of the chosen ones, he decides to set up a meeting with Alma and Gursky, thus doing a good deed without anybody knowing except God.
The Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) and his classic The Street of Crocodiles are mentioned several times in the novel, as is Nicanor Parra (1914–2018), whose 1954 book of antipoems is translated by Charlotte Singer and read by the mysterious Jacob Marcus.
Other important literary allusions in the novel include references to James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Leo Tolstoy, Rubén Darío and Pablo Neruda.
The History of Love was published in early 2005 as was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, written by Jonathan Safran Foer who had just married Krauss.
[6] The book was referenced in the 2021 production Tethered, a story about a grieving woman who has to relive her life with her husband before she can move on from his death.