Three narrators tell the story of a family in Tel Aviv, centered around Kostya Vronsky, a doctor who tries to keep his family in order. His sister Sonya, a deaf professor of mathematics, recounts a day when she invited a stranger into her home and changed her life forever. His son Noah's diary begins when he is ten, and ends after his army service. The letters of Anna, his mother, tell of life in Tel Aviv in the 1950s.