Na březích Dněpru

The novel was first published in 1932 and is inspired by the author's childhood and early youth in a Jewish town in what is now Ukraine, which was then part of the Tsarist Empire. The boy Penek comes from a Yiddish-speaking family of a grain and timber wholesaler. He is the youngest but unloved child in the family. He gradually drifts away from the religious and social life of his relatives and increasingly flees from his large, wealthy home to the suburbs of the shtetl, where unimaginable poverty reigns. His sympathies increasingly belong to the world of the poor and the petty artisans whose sons, though he is initially a "damned lord's son" to them, accept him as their own at the end of the story.

Czech edition