After

In 1945, the allied forces are beginning their trek across Europe, pausing incidentally to free the remaining Jews from Hitler's camps. Hershey bars are distributed to the ravenous living skeletons while bulldozers plow under stacks of the dead. Newly emerged from the ashes, three ex-prisoners - a logician, a saint, and a schemer - come together. Led by nineteen-year-old Isaac Kaufman, this unlikely trio joins forces in survival to exploit the only industry up and running in a crippled German town - the black market. Meeting early success with bootleg cigarettes, forged passports, and a dubious commodity known as DPIDs (Dead Persons' Identification Cards), Isaac remains obsessed with a glimmering object sitting in a military encampment a binocular's view away. The object is a four-foot cube - "eighteen tons of golden ingots created from fillings pried from the teeth of the Jews of eastern Europe." It is the cube that hungry, hopeful Isaac means to claims as his ticket to a new life in the dream land called Far Rockaway. In After, Bukiet's Jews are liberated from the mournful veil of sackcloth sentimentality. They make jokes, they make love, plot for money and material goods and finally save their own lives through their spirited, highly unorthodox dealings with crackpot American GIs, a sleazy cabaret impresario, and a demented German aristocrat.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.