Alon undergoes innovative psychotherapy in New York. He embarks on a tempestuous, soul-searching journey, seeking out the details of his mother's childhood in Poland. He does this as a way of understanding why she, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps, abandoned him at the age of 10. This exciting, peripatetic personal odyssey takes him on a twofold mission to places most people tend to avoid - the searing flames of desire and the tranquil, mysterious forests of dark secrets.