Professor Schiff's Guilt

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An Israeli professor travels to an imaginary West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned there under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. Confined to a villa by local authorities, Professor Schiff meets a string of dignitaries including a former soccer star who has become the country's president. Back in Tel Aviv--the novel unfolds in different time frames--the protagonist has fallen in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house. Both entertaining and thought-provoking, this is a hilarious satire of contemporary attitudes to racism and the legacy of colonialism that examines economic inequality, the global refugee crisis, as well as the historical memory of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor's passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and is the book he is secretly writing about his experiences there nothing but a contemporary version of the slave trade?