The book begins with Marshall Pearl, being carried as one of the wounded back to a hospital at Haifa during the 1973 war in Israel. During the journey he reconstructs his life from his beginnings as a foundling, born in the bowels of a ship rushing the British blockade of Palestine at the creation of an Israeli homeland, to the present. Raised in the Hudson valley, he lives a life of adventure, exploration, love, loss, and finally returns to Israel to reach an ultimate understanding about who he has become.