What does America mean, and what does it mean to be an American? These are complicated questions with a multitude of possible answers. We can't open a newspaper or magazine, or turn on the television or radio or browse the Internet without exposing ourselves to the symbols, images, myths and messages of America.

Those of us who were born in this country begin assimilating these messages at an early age. For immigrants, the meaning of America can be as challenging and frustrating a lesson as the grammatical and syntactic peculiarities of the English language. An even more daunting challenge faces first-generation Americans, those for whom the American experience is a synthesis, a difficult, occasionally forced, reconciliation of the symbols and myths of America with their parents' customs and traditions.

The Red Heifer tells the story of a young Jewish boy's search for his unique American meaning in the New York City of the 1930s and 1940s. He grows up against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the Second World War in an environment bounded on one side by the customs and lessons imparted by his father, a Talmudic scholar, and on the other by the secular, profane and often confusing world of an America that offers the lures of baseball, penny candy and the first rumblings of adolescent sexuality.

The titular Red Heifer refers to a seemingly illogical Jewish purification ritual. The ritual cleanses a person who has become unclean by coming into contact with the dead. At the same time, the priest who performs the cleansing rite becomes temporarily unclean. This strange duality becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience in America and the ease with which immigrants can lose their identity by coming into contact with habits and traditions that seem at once liberating and unclean.