Austeria

The novel is set at the beginning of World War I in a provincial Galician town. In the Jewish tavern, the tavern, are very different characters who had fled from the advancing Russian troops: Hasidim with their zaddik and his family, the shoemaker and the baker, bookbinder and photographer, a Polish priest and a Hungarian-Hussar. They quarrel and make peace, regurgitate rumor and debate about politics. No one yet knows what the future is fraught with war, but the tragedy has already begun: kill a girl in a raging fire and Cossack pogrom.