The year is 1939, and Martin Goldberg, a twenty-year-old American college student, aches for the next world war to start. In the meantime, he teaches English to refugees. Of his four clients, Oskar Gassner, a Berlin critic and journalist, gradually becomes his most demanding. He needs to improve his abilities quickly because his job will require him to give an English lecture on Whitman that October. The prospect terrifies him, but they labor for hours every day to make it happen. That is, they do until Oskar flounders on composing his lecture -- whether he drafts in English or German, he cannot seem to begin. Giving up on that causes him to lose his progress in English as well, and their lessons stop. Oskar becomes deeply depressed. Martin begins to worry about his friend, who attempted suicide once before, and looks after him on his own time. After a scare, Oskar explains the problem: his lecture is complete in his mind, but as soon as he begins to write, fear of failure paralyzes him. Finally, a breakthrough comes: Martin, days from giving up on Oskar out of fear that he could drown with him, takes a stab at writing about Oskar's subject. Although he gets it wrong, his attempt inspires Oskar to write the first half of his lecture, and the rest comes easily. The lecture goes off without a hitch, and both men are overjoyed until, two days later, Martin finds Oskar dead from suicide. His anti-Semitic mother-in-law has sent him a letter: his wife, a Gentile, has been killed in the Holocaust.