Leavetaking is the story of an upper-middle-class childhood and adolescence in Berlin between the wars. In the course of the novel, Weiss plumbs the depths of family life: there is the early death of his beloved sister Margot, the difficult relationship with his parents and the fantasies of adolescence and youth. All of this is set in the midst of an increasing anti-Semitism, which forces the Weiss family to move again and again, a tenuous existence that only intensifies the narrator's growing restlessness.
