"You don't look right to me. You're not a little god-damn Commie, by any chance?" his homeroom teacher Mrs. Kukla asks Robert Nifkin. This harangue epitomizes the world of his high school, situated as it is in the Eisenhower 1950s, with the Cold War hot and the country haunted by hunts everywhere for communist subversives, including daily and bizzare hunts in Nifkin's high school. Mrs. MacAllister, his English teacher, adds to these hunts for communists her own perverse twist that Jews are also to be feared, "And Jews want to destroy our traditional values. They are sexual deviants, and they spread pornography." This adds greatly to the Jewish Nifkin's discomfort at school.

Then there is Mrs. Sweet, the biology teacher, who talks to her plants, ignores her students, and conducts one of the most disgusting frog dissection labs in history. All this has Nifkin wondering, "Was there an...