THE WALLS AND THE GATES is a panoramic novel of modern life, from the Great Depression to the upheavals of the 1960s, dealing with the lives and fates of a varied group of fascinating human beings: An Irish-American family of immigrants whose father works on the New York City docks; a family of Tsarist refugees from the Soviet Union whose father remains an activist anti-Communist political; still another family, of immigrant Italians, who fled their native country and have since prospered in the California wine country. We see the interlocking fates of the two major characters, best friends, as the Irish American boy struggles to become a doctor, and the Russian American boy, a musical genius, struggles to become an internationally known concert pianist. We watch their conflicts with themselves, with one another, and with their lives and times, their successes and defeats, until, finally, they come to understand that "Tears may open the gates, but joy will bring down the very walls."