Fima lives in Jerusalem, but all his life he has the feeling that he should be somewhere else. In Fima’s life there were enough secret love relationships and non-trivial ideas; in his youth, great hopes were pinned on him - his debut collection of poems became a high-profile event. But Fima prefers to think about the structure of the world and how his country got lost in the labyrinths of the universe. He was always consumed by melancholy - varied, enduring. And now, having passed her fifties, Fima lives in a dilapidated apartment, struggles with everyday troubles, flounders in the web of love longings and works as an administrator in a gynecological clinic. Everyone loves him, but they can hardly stand his company. He is the one who allowed dreams and fantasies to overcome reality. His scrambled eggs always burn, his sandwich falls down like jam, a dead cockroach reads existential lectures to him, and the arrival of the painters is seen as an apocalypse. But in the chaos of Fima’s life, a firefly flickers dimly, but confidently and persistently. Hope? Love? Wisdom? Who knows. Amos Oz paints a portrait of a man and a generation capable of amazing dreams, but so stuck in their dreams. This is one of the most “Russian” novels of the Israeli classic, in which the shadows of Pushkin, Gogol and Chekhov are clearly visible. As Amos Oz himself writes: “Fima is Eugene Onegin from the Kiryat Yovel quarter and Oblomov from Jerusalem, with whom my hero is connected by many threads.”