Redheaded Lila is the youngest in a friendly family of arachnids whose untamed imagination gets her into trouble. One day, she falls into a bag of flour while hunting moths, the next, she accidentally releases flies from a farm and hands over her brother's beloved guitar to a fraud. As if that were not enough, an alien spider from the Great Puddle tries to befriend her.
Slovakia, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II. The family of the young Jewish Martin Friedmann gathers to celebrate his bar mitzvah and make a solemn promise that they will all meet again a year later around the same table; but the storms of war and anti-Semitic fanaticism will lead each of them down very different paths.