Set dur­ing the dawn of World War II and the dis­rup­tive decade to fol­low, A Ritchie Boy fea­tures Eli Stoff, a young Jew­ish immi­grant from Vien­na who escapes to Amer­i­ca with his par­ents just after Ger­many takes over Aus­tria. With­in five years, he joins the U.S. Army and, thanks to his under­stand­ing of the Ger­man lan­guage and cul­ture, joins thou­sands of oth­ers like him who become known as Ritchie boys, young men who work under­cov­er in Intel­li­gence on the Euro­pean front to help the Allies win the war.

The nar­ra­tive is writ­ten as a series of inter­re­lat­ed sto­ries, each told by dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, that fol­low Eli from Vien­na to New York, from Ohio to Mary­land, and then to war-torn Europe before he returns to the heart­land of his new coun­try to set down his roots. These sto­ries unfold the cir­cum­stances and peo­ple that help shape Eli’s jour­ney from Europe to Amer­i­ca, and from boy­hood to manhood.