The Partisan's Coat

Joe Kamens stared into the glass case in the military museum in Minsk. There it was, his coat, just like the one he had found as a child in a dusty suitcase in Melbourne. Once, it had kept a heroic Jewish partisan warm in the freezing forests of Belarus.

Yanosh and Eva, Holocaust survivors, have built new lives in Australia, far away from the horrors, but Joe, their son, caught up in the passions and intimacies of a Zionist youth movement, is inexorably drawn to the alternative they rejected: Israel. Arriving in the land of his dreams in the devastated aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he hopes to find the partisan behind his coat. Is he still alive? Really dead? Or now a Mossad agent?

Joe is intent on strengthening the country he loves and building a family of his own. But as he begins to unravel the fragmentary stories of friends and family members, the coat's enigmatic original owner criss-crosses his life, forcing him to question his loyalties, his faith, and his identity.