It is 1920 in the port of Hamburg when a young man boards the steamer Leviathan, bound for New York. Moishke Tarabeur has left his shtetl in what was then Poland and is now Belarus. Kletsk has been caught in the war between Poland and the new Soviet state, settled when the border was established just east of town. In the 1920s it was one of hundreds of mostly Jewish towns in the Pale of Settlement between Warsaw and Moscow. It had a flourishing cattle trade but not yet the major shoe factory that would develop under Soviet rule. Its 3,000-odd Jews worshiped in seven synagogues, alongside Catholic and Orthodox churches and a mosque for the Tatar minority.

The Jews of Kletsk were mainly occupied in trade in the center of town, but there were few sources of employment for young people and virtually no public services. Through mutual aid and charity, the community provided itself with schools, but neither its residents nor their neighbors had a health service, and there was no hospital for miles. Like thousands of others, Moishke left home to escape poverty, disorder, and the anti-Semitism that invariably follows a popular uprising in this part of the world.