From one of America's most elegant and literate writers comes The Bacon Fancier, a book in four tales set in successive centuries and linked by a common theme: the Jewish experience in the Gentile world. In the title novella, one-eyed Cardozo of Porlock, maker of fine violins, shelters a waif who becomes his life's love but whom he can never marry. In "The Monster," an unnamed but familiar Venetian moneylender relates the pathetic end of the Ghetto's fool, and in the telling reveals his own sad fate.

Young David Gladstone of "The Crossing" departs Victorian England and gaily embarks on a shipboard journey to America only to find that the New World offers no solace.