The novel, written by Yoram Kaniuk, centers on former circus clown Adam Stein who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths.

Stein is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors. Alternately more brilliant than the doctors and more insane than any of the patients, Adam struggles wildly to make sense of a world in which the line between sanity and madness has been irreversibly blurred.