When Luiz Schwarcz was a child, he was told little about his grandfather L ios, a Hungarian Jew. Only later would he learn that L ios had ordered his son, Luiz s father, to leap from a train taking them to a Nazi death camp, while L ios himself was carried on to his death. What Luiz did know was that his father s melancholia haunted the house he grew up in.

As many children of trauma do, Luiz assumed responsibility for his parents happiness, and for a time blossomed into the family prodigy. But then, at a high point of outward success, he was brought low by a devastating mental breakdown. This astonishing memoir interrogates a personal story of mental health through a family history of murder, dispossession, silence and the long echo of the Holocaust across generations animated by the love and compassion of a master storyteller.