America in the 1940s, the height of World War II. The story centers on a man named Hertz Minsker, a maverick hybrid of existentialist philosopher, religious thinker, and psychoanalytic theorist who rejects all categories in favor of what he calls “the study of man,” a hodgepodge of reflections on humanity and its aspirations. Minsker cannot complete a single book he started, but some of the Jewish emigrants who speak Yiddish, like him, consider him a failed genius, a lost soul from a famous rabbinical family, because he constantly extracts money from his wife, friends and girlfriends, but has the potential to become a great person. Minsker is surrounded by people no less lost - his best friend, a businessman, who often provides him with financial support, the wife of this businessman, a graphomaniac poetess, eager to make her way in the world of Yiddish literature, a spiritualist housewife who arranges fake seances for Minsker, and his wife, who lives in constant depression because she left her husband and children in Poland and fled with Hertz to America. The novel traces the actions of these and other characters, while Minsker turns their already difficult personal lives into complete chaos.