This is the story of Clara, a young journalist who embarks reluctantly upon a pilgrimage to her mother Frieda’s native Vienna. A Parisian by birth and by choice, Clara resists her origins, refusing to speak German, and has until now remained ignorant of her mother’s flight from Nazi occupied Austria when she was a young girl. In this taut, lyrical and deeply moving tale, novelist Michèle Halberstadt alternates between past and present in a set of prose variations that evoke the dazzle and splendor of pre-war Vienna and its café culture, while examining the relationship between mother and daughter, past and present, tragic loss and resurrection. In the end, Frieda teaches the existential Clara that her irrepressible joie de vivre has allowed her to transcend the pain of her harrowing experience.