To be down and out in Paris as a young man: The twenty-one-year-old hero struggles to survive, taking multiple jobs, including that of secret agent for the French government. After the untimely deaths of his father and his brother, he takes on the struggle for daily existence, overcoming enormous handicaps as a polio survivor, living as a Jew in anti-Semitic France, and the desperate search for work and for love, while the call of adventure opens up the long road toward finding himself. A first novel translated from French.