Over a span of five days in 2017, two strangers find them­selves in a sea-rocked san­i­tar­i­um on the coast of Maine where, as they gath­er at an auc­tion for a piece of art stolen in the Sec­ond World War, they must reck­on with the wounds of inher­i­tance: shame, dis­place­ment, and the long­ing of exiles.

Jacob, grand­son of a Holo­caust sur­vivor, son of refugees, has lived his life over­shad­owed by the grief of oth­ers. His mis­takes have cost him his job and his mar­riage. So when he meets Baer, an impov­er­ished Holo­caust sur­vivor look­ing for help, Jacob sees an oppor­tu­ni­ty to redeem himself.

But what Baer wants won’t be easy. A piece of art giv­en to him as a boy – and that dis­ap­peared dur­ing the war – has resur­faced and is about to go up for auc­tion in a seclud­ed san­i­tar­i­um for Holo­caust sur­vivors and their fam­i­lies on an island off the coast of Maine. The head of the san­i­tar­i­um is Alex Baruch, a dis­graced writer and Kab­bal­ist whose mem­oir about sur­viv­ing the Holo­caust has been denounced as fraud­u­lent. Baer asks Jacob to go to the auc­tion with his niece, Rachel, and steal back the piece.

Rachel car­ries grief of her own. She’s mourn­ing her hus­band, a young Jew try­ing to sep­a­rate him­self from his ultra-ortho­dox com­mu­ni­ty, and instead of liv­ing the artist’s life she dreamed, she’s work­ing in a muse­um base­ment answer­ing ques­tions on the phone about paint­ings she can’t see. Griev­ing and guilty, she’s eager for an impos­si­ble quest.

Togeth­er, Rachel and Jacob head to the san­i­tar­i­um, where they find Baruch and his com­mu­ni­ty of odd and bro­ken souls. But two nights before the auc­tion, in the midst of a storm, a stranger appears – an old man, a ghost or a dyb­buk, or just a sur­vivor of the Euro­pean cat­a­stro­phe – bear­ing a secret. As the line between forgery and authen­tic­i­ty blurs, Rachel and Jacob, Baruch and his fol­low­ers must face the claims the dead make on the liv­ing, in a sur­re­al reck­on­ing with the past where no one is who they say they are, but every­one may be telling the truth.

Recall­ing the warmth and humor of Nicole Krauss and Joshua Cohen, and the wild col­lage of his­to­ry and fan­ta­sy of Bruno Schulz and Olga Tokar­czuk, The Tav­ern at the End of His­to­ry is a deeply felt explo­ration of grief, love, and iden­ti­ty in the long shad­ow of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry calamity.