Loosely based on the true story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose fabricated 1995 Holocaust memoir transfixed the reading public, The Canvas has a singular construction, its two inter-related narratives begin at either end and meet in the middle. Amnon Zichroni, a psychoanalyst in Zurich, encourages Minsky to write a book about his traumatic childhood experience in a Nazi death camp, a memoir which the journalist Jan Wechsler claims is a fiction. Years later, a suitcase arrives on Wechsler's doorstep, allegedly lost in Israel, a trip he has no memory of.