"What if you get the chance to save one person in your lifetime. And what if you wasted it on yourself?"
It's 1938 and a pogrom unlike any other sends Yitzhak Langlebben on a religious mission through the shtetls of Poland. Working with his great uncle, Yitzhak sets off on a journey that forces him to leave everyone he knows and loves behind.
It's 2010 and Jake Langley finds himself left with the bleak task of cleaning out his recently deceased father's house. As he sorts through the detritus of his father Ike's life, Jake comes across a list of names and places, all written in Ike's hand. Jake soon realizes what he has uncovered - remnants of a story his mother used to tell him when he was little.
Unbinding Isaac tells the tale of two young men: one discovering that the world he's known is forever changing, the other seeking desperately to know the man who raised him - two experiences lived a lifetime apart, yet interconnected by the shared legacy of survival and loss.
A novel that understands the weight of choices we make to survive, Unbinding Isaac is about what it means to be a survivor - and about the generational scars that selfsame survival leaves in its wake.
