Solomon Kugel wishes for nothing more than to be in a place with no past. The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing, and nothing of any importance has ever happened there- so he's decided to move his family there, to start anew. But it isn't quite working out that way. His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won't stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one he's bought, and one night, Kugel discovers a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history hiding in his attic. Bad is very quickly becoming worse.