3 ideas
In the final, earliest conversation, set in 1848 Athens, the patriarch Avraham Mani confesses to his dying rabbi and mentor. His son Yosef was killed in Palestine after trying to persuade Arab villagers that they were Jews who had forgotten their origins.
The novel tells its generations backward, from 1982 to 1848. Each earlier conversation therefore explains a pattern the reader has already seen, such as the Manis' suicidal impulses and their compulsion to dissolve boundaries between peoples. Seen this way, identity reads as an excavation site: the present is the symptom, and understanding comes from digging down to an origin the living never knew.
Across generations the Manis keep trying to erase the line between Jew and Arab or Jew and other. Examples include Yosef's claim that local Arabs are lost Jews and a later Yosef urging Arabs in 1918 Jerusalem to wake up to the coming Zionist claim. The book presents this refusal of fixed borders as morally generous yet self-destructive, since those who cross boundaries repeatedly end up killed, tried or suicidal.