Prague, 1810, during the era of the Napoleonic Wars. The city is flourishing with everyday business activity and outside the battle lines, but the war takes its toll. The population struggles under the burden of wounded soldiers in the hospitals, epidemics, and rationed food supplies during the harsh winter.
Judith, in her early twenties, lives with her teenage brother, Schmolke, in a small and dark room in Prague’s Jewish quarter. They are orphans, having recently lost both of their parents to an epidemic, which forced them to leave their comfortable family home.
Their relatives are either deceased or missing. Their father, a traditional Kabbalist but an unpopular freethinker, was rumoured to have secretly hoarded wealth. Judith finds it difficult to envision getting married; instead, she works long hours at Prague’s fabric market to make ends meet and support her brother, who attends a Christian school and faces indignities. However, there are vultures circling around Judith, one of them Adi, the son of a shopkeeper she is working for, a gambling dandy.
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