Winter hushes the traffic and stops the clocks. It seems as though it has always been cold. New Yorkers know this in their bodies before they consciously accept what they are in for; their shoulders hunch in anticipation; their gaits are measured and slower, pushing through drifts of phantom snow.

Saul Grossman is no stranger to winter, having grown up in Berlin, where on the darkest days the sun doesn’t rise until late morning and begins to set again as soon as it has crested the horizon; where a man’s toes can turn black in the course of one day’s work in badly insulated boots; where the darkness and the cold brew in the belly to produce a hunger that can’t be satisfied, even in the most prosperous years and with the most succulent foods. As a child, he relished the first snow angels, the rush of sledding down the unshoveled sidewalks, and the way the heat of his apartment stung before it softened his frozen cheeks; the fleeting whoosh of warmth escaping from the opening and closing doors of pubs and bakeries. He longed for the winter break from school, when his mother would take him to work with her, and Saul would spend the morning reading on the floors of grand houses as his mother scrubbed bathroom tiles and swept out fireplaces. In the afternoons, she bought him treats from street carts. Cider and gingerbread sliding down his throat in warm gulps as his nose ran freely and his mother pulled his scarf tighter around his neck. When it snowed, Saul was the first one out the door in his apartment building, soon followed by a passel of bundled-up children, hands stuffed into woolen mittens, sleds under their arms. Even later, after Nuremberg, there were snowy days he remembers feeling carefree and invincible.

But this year, Saul faces the onslaught of winter with a persistent and chilling despair.

If one’s soul is warm with love and one’s house is full of family and beloved trinkets and fragrant smells and one’s work is satisfying; if one sleeps well at night and eats well during the day and the muscles in one’s hands and feet do not cramp up, winter can be a welcome means by which to narrow the world down to the most important parts. But Saul, alone in a new country and desperately worried about his old one, has nothing to warm him up or weigh him down. He alternates between certainty that his life in Germany was a dream, and distrust that his feet have really touched earth since he crawled shaking out of the ship’s hold three months ago. He feels torn in jagged halves and faces winter in America with nothing outside of his fallible body and a bare room in a Lower East Side boardinghouse to cushion his bones against the cold.