The author imagines a tiny Jewish town in modern-day Poland called Kreskol that somehow got cut off from the outside world and survived the Holocaust unscathed, with its customs and traditions intact. When the shtetl sends Yankel, a hapless, functionally illiterate young man, to ask for the government’s help in locating a missing couple, he is soon confined to a mental hospital while the powers-that-be try to determine if he’s a madman.