Buried deep in the bedroom closet of Rachel Wallfisch's father are stacks of fading photographs and piles of dusty old film reels. For Rachel, a Jewish girl growing up in 1950s New York, the images contained in this dark closet are ones that she has never actually witnessed, yet are as familiar to her as her own reflection.

For recorded in these photos and films are the faces of the Holocaust: hopeful but nervous young Jewish couples on their wedding days, married in group ceremonies because they have no family but each other; the vitality of Rachel's mother captured on film before her sudden death, decades after the liberation, of a latent disease contracted in the concentration camps; and throughout, the gentle presence of Rachel's father, weary but full of love in the face of unspeakable horrors.

This is a novel of the emotional toll attached to being a child of survivors. As the memories which haunt her family lay their claim on her own existence, Rachel is torn between her Rabbi's warning to "never forget" and establishing her own independence as an adult.