Between 1942 and 1944, in a ghetto in Romania-occupied Ukraine, Pinkhas Rubinstein helped transport hundreds of children to safety. He was sent to Stalin's Gulag for his actions, sentenced to miss the first years of his son's life.

More than half a century later, his granddaughter, the writer Helen Betya Rubinstein, asks to see the only recorded account of his life: the long-classified case against him, built by the Soviet secret police. By then, she has already written her grandfather's story in hundreds of drafts, each one a failure--a fiction. She's suspicious of her own desires, leery of telling a story too wishful to be real.

Part history, part memoir, part inquest, The Case Against Rubinstein is an inspired search for one man across an unreliable archive and a catastrophic century, and a reckoning with why the stories we most want to tell are the ones hardest to reveal.