The "item in question" that Adam's father's letter leads him to acquire from a safe deposit box in Switzerland is a precious Russian Orthodox icon made long ago for the Russian czars which by misadventure came into the possession of Hermann Göring sometime in the 1930s.
The position of the Jews under the Czars was never easy, but it became much worse when Czar Alexander I was succeeded by Czar Nicholas I in 1825.