On Island City, which may be, or may once have been, Manhattan, in a once-luxurious apartment block called The Morningside, an 11-year-old girl watches and learns about the community she lives in while yearning to discover more about the community she comes from.
Silvia and her family – her mother and her aunt, Ena, the superintendent of the block – are refugees from an unnamed country whose traditions and myths they carry with them in revealingly different ways. Ena treasures the past and revisits it, preserving artefacts and telling folk tales from the old country, while Silvia’s mother, who has her own reasons to want to leave everything behind, is against reminiscing and discourages her daughter’s questions about her father, her family and life in the old country.
