Across four generations spanning the twentieth century, this is the story of the Ivanov family, secrets and all.

From prerevolutionary Russia, young Sacha Ivanov and his childhood friend Victor Bornstein come to Paris to study medicine and distance themselves from the turmoil that’s taking over their native land. White Russians by birth, they soon feel more French than anything else, serving their adoptive country during the first world war, Victor as a medic and Sacha in the Foreign Legion. Victor saves his friend’s life during that war. One of Sacha’s emerging family secrets is that he has Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side, but his growing temerity and bravado spares him from extermination as a Jew in the camps of the second world war.

Through war, deportation, resistance, love, birth, and death, one thing remains constant: the family jewels. For the Ivanovs, the jewels could be defined as a hereditary urge to live many lives in one, with the secrets this implies and the troubles that ensue. By the fourth generation, Leo, Sacha’s grandson, will get a whiff of untruth in the stories he’s heard of the family’s past and will go digging for what went unsaid. He discovers among other things that his younger sister is really his aunt and that the family’s supposed noble and valiant past, as well as its place of origin, may not in fact be true.