But what is hailed as the most important testament of the Holocaust is in fact a short story, written in 1946 for a Yiddish newspaper by a remarkable young Jew, Zvi Kolitz, in Buenos Aires, where he had gone to raise money for the Jewish underground in the struggle to establish the State of Israel. The Borgesian story of what happened to the text and to Kolitz in the fifty years since, and the detective work of German journalist Paul Badde that resulted in their eventual rejoining, form the second part of this fascinating book. And in an afterword, the great French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's meditation on the text is answered in a commentary by Leon Wieseltier.

An acclaimed bestseller in Europe, "Yosl Rakover Talks to God" restores a blazing artifact of twentieth-century writing to its true setting.