The Emigrants consists, as its subtitle baldly states, of ‘four long stories’, which reconstruct the biographies of the exiles and émigrés whose names form the stories' titles. ‘Dr Henry Selwyn’ is a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated to England in 1899, who has had a distinguished academic and medical career and married Hedi, a woman whose inherited wealth had allowed them to live in a grand style in the 1920s and 1930s. The narrator encounters the couple when he rents a flat in Prior's Gate, their capacious Norfolk home. ‘Paul Bereyter’ is the narrator's much-admired schoolteacher. As a so-called Dreiviertelarier or threequarter Aryan, Bereyter is initially forced out of his job as a schoolmaster in the 1930s, and spends some time as a private tutor in France before returning to Germany and serving in the Wehrmacht for six years. After the war he takes up his former post in ‘S.’, before moving, more or less permanently, to Yverdon. He commits suicide on his final visit to S. in 1984. ‘Ambros Adelwarth’ tells the story of the narrator's great-uncle, who emigrates to the United States and spends most of his life serving the Solomons, one of New York's wealthiest Jewish banking families. Adelwarth accompanies the Solomons' youngest son, Cosmo, on numerous trips through Europe and the Middle East. After Cosmo's premature death, Adelwarth eventually admits himself to a mental hospital where he hastens his own death by subjecting himself voluntarily to a lengthy course of electroconvulsive therapy.