In the early 1990s, Noah Millman (a Young Man Not Unlike Myself) travels to meet his grandmother in Poland, where she is on a Jewish heritage tour. It’s her first visit back since she left after the Holocaust. She’s traveling with a companion of hers, an American Jewish man her age from Florida, and Noah struggles with an unreasonable jealousy as he tries to pry the true story of his grandmother’s wartime experiences from her recalcitrant lips. Every time Noah thinks he’s gotten the story, though, someone—or something—changes it.

Alternating between chapters written by Noah the character at different points in his lives, and chapters written by this Noah looking back on that life, and remembering, then finally retracing, that early-1990s trip thirty years later, Fables of a Jewish Century is both a contained “third generation” Holocaust story like Jesse Eisenberg’s film, “A Real Pain,” and a narrative that sweeps across centuries and continents. It tries to make sense of the radical transformation the world at large and the Jewish world writ-small has undergone over the past thirty years, and grapple with the persistent feeling that history is darkly repeating itself.

Featuring tape recorders that spontaneously change the messages being recorded, paintings that come to life in an attempt to recreate the lost pre-war shtetl, and talking Jewish cats with human mothers; an assassin still wrestling with the meaning of his crime decades after his death, and an NKVD officer being interrogated in hell for the crime of doing a good deed, Fables of a Jewish Century is also a revisiting and rethinking of the magic realism that played so prominent a role in fiction in the early 1990s.

Ultimately, Fables of a Jewish Century is about the universally human, and also specifically Jewish, effort to define our lives in terms of stories. Stories explain our origins and determine our destinies, and stories help us orient ourselves in a larger context to give our lives meaning. But the closer you look at those stories, the more they tend to dissipate and fly apart—or turn around and devour themselves, and us with them.

Sample chapters are available upon request.