The year is 1911 when Keyle, a Jewish prostitute, meets the love of her life, Yarme, an ex-convict. The young couple dreams of escaping the misery of the Warsaw ghetto, where they live under the constant threat of pogroms, so when Max, an old acquaintance, offers them to participate in his lucrative business in South America, they don't hesitate for a moment. But Max is also attracted to Yarme, and a fateful love triangle ensues that will haunt Keyle on the dark streets of the ghetto as well as on the avenues of a big American city. In this brilliant novel, unpublished in Spanish, Singer portrays, with the mastery of Dickens or Dostoevsky, the underworld of the Jewish community, populating them with a rich cast of unique characters with whom he creates a vivid fresco of an entire society and an era.