Mendel is a nine-year-old Jewish boy who emigrates from Germany to Norway with his family in the 1950s. His parents have told him that no Jew can live in Germany after all that has happened. But nobody will tell him exactly what it was that happened. Mendel comes up with his own version of the past, put together from snippets of conversation and vague innuendo. He is plagued by nightmares, just like his father, and in the daytime he imagines himself as a resistance fighter who would have made short shrift of the Nazis. His question “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” turns into the accusation “Why didn’t you put up a fight, Daddy?” He bolsters his pride by waging a feud against an outsider in the village, who the children imagine is a monster and who, in Mendel's eyes, is the very incarnation of an anti-Semite. But Mendel is in for a surprise.