Summary

The elderly female narrator, whose name is eventually revealed to be Raya Moscowitz, defines the story she’s about to tell as beginning with a journey she took through a sewer to escape to freedom. Freedom from what is never explicitly defined, but given the descriptions of the circumstances in which Raya was living, there is the clear sense that she is Jewish, and escaping from the Nazis at the beginning of World War II. Raya explains how, when she climbed out of the sewers and made her way into a forest, she encountered a familiar face from home – the man who became her husband, Leon Moscowitz, then a teenager. She described how Leon took her to an encampment of young people who call themselves as The Yiddish Underground, a group of teenaged resistance fighters. Raya is assigned to...