In the 1930s, New York is swarming with Europe's ousted dreamers, alien families adapting to a new world. Rose Meadows unknowingly enters the lives of one such family when she answers an ad for an "assistant" to a Herr Mitwisser, the patriarch of a large household living in an obscure little neighborhood, in a remote corner of the sparse and weedy northeast Bronx. With an uncertain future, and no clear idea of her duties, Rose-orphaned at eighteen and recently turned out by lover-has become a refugee among refugees. Expelled from Berlin's elite, Professor Mitwisser-a researcher obsessed with an arcane religious doctrine-lives with his wife, a prominent physicist now quietly going mad, and Anneliese, their willful sixteen-year-old daughter. When Anneliese's fierce longing draws a new outcast into the fold-a vagrant actor running from fame-it's up to Rose to quell the emotional, sexual, spiritual, and societal tempests brewing within the Mitwissers unsettled home

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