The Emigrants is written in four parts. In part one we see Dr. Henry Selwyn who had emigrated from Lithuania to England. The doctor's increasing alienation in a foreign country leads to an inevitable detachment from his present reality. Selwyn confides to the narrator his estrangement from his wife and his inability to assimilate to England because of the lingering memories of his childhood and his homeland. Selwyn commits suicide by putting a gun in his mouth.
Part two of the book sees the narrator's primary school teacher Paul Bereyter who was a quarter Jewish. Although Bereyter was a quarter Jewish he did not have to face torture and ostracism at the hands of the Nazi's, he was considered German enough to serve in the Nazi army. However, Bereyter could not stand working for the forces that endeavored to eliminate his race and homeland. After the war he had to teach the children of those who had banished and ostracized him for his ancestry, which he failed to come to accept. He committed suicide by lying down on train tracks.
In the third part the narrator travels to the USA to visit his great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, who had escaped Germany shortly after the First World War. When Adelwarth initially comes to America he works as a butler for a wealthy Jewish family but later he becomes the close companion of Cosmo Solomon, an aviator. When Solomon dies Adelwarth falls into a severe depression and he is committed to a mental institute, the same one that Solomon was committed in before he died. In the institution Adelwarth is subjected to painful electro-conclusive shock therapy by the despotic director of the institution.
The final part chronicles the narrator's meeting with Max Ferber in Manchester, England. Ferber and his family had tried to escape Nazi Germany when he was a teenager but his parents were caught and they were killed. Orphaned and alone so young, Ferber spent most of his time painting, his art tries to uncover the repressed memories and trauma from his childhood and adolescence. Ferber divulges to the narrator that though this method has helped him learn more about himself it has also made him extremely unhappy and detached from his own life.
