In The Shadow of the Cross, the Tharaud brothers (the inseparable Academicians who wrote "on all fours") recount the life of Jews in the shtetl, feet in the mud, head in the clouds, and tongues wagging. A picturesque life, always on the verge of being uprooted, threatened by persecution, the difficulty of maintaining a balance between Heaven and the World, and the call of the outside world: Christianity, the foreign, modernity. A universe now vanished.
Their first "Jewish Novel," which sold 216,000 copies.
