2. Several characters in the novel intentionally change their identities, some by embracing religion, others by rejecting it. What do the different characters—Jason, Leah, and Nadav, among others—gain or lose through these choices? When a person makes the choice to reject or embrace religion at the beginning of the twentieth century, are they making the same choice as a person faced with the same question a hundred years later?

3. While the characters move frequently between Europe and America, the novel ends literally beneath the Statue of Liberty. What kind of picture of America emerges from the novel, from sweat-shops to Costco? What opportunities does America offer the characters, and what burdens do those opportunities bring with them?

4. This is a novel of modern Jewish history, but unlike so many novels on this subject, it is emphatically not a novel about anti-Semitism, or even about the Holocaust. Instead, the book’s tragedies are tragic in the true sense—that is, the characters are generally not innocent victims, but rather bring disaster upon themselves. Does this make the book’s many catastrophes easier to understand, or harder? How does this approach change your view of Jewish history?

5. A central theme of the book is the idea of reclamation: ritual objects thrown overboard appear a century later in a junk shop, pieces of coal resurface millennia later as diamonds, a primitive skull is discovered, a neglected dollhouse is restored, and the novel’s ending reveals a vast underwater treasury of lost things. In describing diamond formation, Horn writes that “Nothing is ever really lost.” But a Jewish new year ceremony consists of symbolically casting one’s sins away in order to start a new year. Does it work? Can people be forgiven? If it is true that nothing is ever lost, is that a blessing or a curse?

6. Jake tells Leora that “just because life doesn’t work the way you want it to doesn’t mean that what happens in the world is completely random. The times when people really do interact with God are exactly those times when life doesn’t work out fairly.” Is this observation borne out in the novel? In reality?

7. Near the end of the biblical Book of Job, in answer to Job’s questions about why he has suffered so undeservedly, God responds by describing the many unfathomable wonders of the world he has created, asking Job if he knows, for example, where the storehouses of snow are kept, or how God sets the boundaries of the sea (see Job chapters 38–41). In “The Book of Hurricane Job” in the novel, God responds to Bill Landsmann’s questions by recounting the private moments of the novel’s many characters. What kind of limitations of human understanding does this suggest? How much do the characters in the novel really know about one another, and how much do they miss? How much can people ever know about one another?