Scum

Scum evokes the teeming life of 1906 Warsaw's backstreets. Max Barabander, distraught over the recent death of his son, flees the life of wealth and respectability he has attained in Buenos Aires, returning to the poverty and shadows of his youth spent in Warsaw.

He fears impotence, which leads him to the pursuit of mindless sex with five different women who view him only as an escape from their drab lives. Appearing serially in Yiddish in 1967, and published in translation the year he passed away, this impressive novel explores the changing of both mores and values.