Seven short allegorical tales of characters coping to live in the aftershock of the Holocaust. Grete Weil compares them to survivors of an atom-bomb blast, who live beyond the initial explosion and consider the worst to be over, only to later sicken and die. The survivors’ lives are damaged, even physically destroyed, by the aftershock ―by their inability to shed the culture of the country from which they have fled, their intense memories of happier times, and by the constant intrusion of the ghosts of both victims and persecutors.