"From the two-time National Book Award winning author of The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country, a short, powerful novel about an American professor of Holocaust Studies who, over the course of a weeklong spiritual retreat at Auschwitz, is forced to grapple with his own past and a family secret: the Jewish mother abandoned to her doom by his Gentile father"-- 1996. Clements Olin, an American professor of Holocaust Studies, is on a weeklong spiritual retreat at Auschwitz to complete his research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As days pass and tensions mount among the participants, Clements is forced to grapple with his own past and a family secret: the Jewish mother abandoned to her doom by his Gentile father. Provided by publisher.