Futur de Luxe

The family of the celebrated geneticist Doctor Klein, a German Jew who emigrated to Israel, gathers for Shabbat in the year 2020. At first everything is entirely ordinary: trouble between children and parents, or over a spouse's fidelity, has always existed, and throughout the confrontation these troubles keep returning to the plane of "life as lived". After a startling revelation by Doctor Theo Klein, however, the whole family finds itself facing head-on a few questions that the rest of humanity considers only in theory: is a human being fundamentally bad, or good? What are the psychological consequences of cloning for the individual? What does a young man do, for instance, when he suddenly learns that he is the clone of one of the greatest criminals in history? How much are we shaped by nature and how much by culture? How is the question of building an identity overturned once cloning exists? All these questions are bound up with the old doctor's need to find answers to the tragedy of the Holocaust and the loss of his family during the war, to the demands made by religion and by atheism, and to his own Jewishness - which adds a further dimension to the debate.