"I was given my life as a gift so many times that it was no longer mine, and I gave it away. Because it wasn't about me at all. Understand, I do not regret taking monastic vows; I said yes, and with God's help I will live as a monk for the rest of my life." Daniel Stein is a Polish Jewish refugee who almost as a child becomes an interpreter for the Gestapo in occupied Lithuania, while risking his life he escapes Jews from the ghetto, then he becomes a partisan, and after the war he takes a monk's vow in a Cracow monastery to travel to Israel in a few years; his intention was to revive the church of Jacob, the brother of the Lord, on the model of the early Christian communities. His whole life was full of faith, full of love, full of service. But an idealist does not have an easy time in the Holy Land either, the world treats idealists everywhere in its own way... Christians, Jews, Arabs, believers and unbelievers, unhappy and obsessed - Ulickaja populates the world surrounding Daniel Stein in his novel with seemingly inexhaustible imagination and knowledge of people in the twentieth century in the historical whirlwind and everyday life of the second half. Ulickaja tells an engaging story, but the tale does not cover the disturbing questions either. And the writer's answer is always the fate of a hero: this time it belongs to brother Daniel, who as an interpreter "speaks in tongues", as a person tirelessly searches for and finds the light - both in himself and in the world.