It has been 23 years since five-year-old Helene (Leni) Gelbart said goodbye to her father at a railroad station in Germany just before World War II was legally declared. Her parents were divorced: he had terminated an unsuitable marriage, one which had tainted his Aryan ancestry with her mother's Jewish blood. Now Leni makes her first visit to her once-beloved Vati, as well as to his third wife and several step-brothers, ignoring at her peril very different - and deadly - agendas that are already in play in her father's household. In the midst of barely bungled attempts on her life and a sudden, intense affair with Wolf Herzog, a distant cousin, she encounters heartbreaking and frightening residues of the war and the Holocaust.