What do you do when your ancestral responsibility to pray for your community can’t be met because your community no longer exists? How does one use music to connect to their identity, even to pray? How does one relate to God when they’ve lost everything? How does one come to terms with something as unbelievable as the Holocaust after the war has ended? What happens when a Jewish man, who has lost everything, finds a second chance by living in, and marrying into, Black communities in Mississippi and New York in the 1950s?

These are some of the big questions posed in a moving and uniquely told, award-winning, and critically-acclaimed debut novel by Howard Langer, entitled The Last Dekrepitzer.