Rabbi and Priest: A Story

The narrative traces the upheaval faced by a persecuted community after arrests and deportations, following families and youths through forced marches to remote exile, imprisonment, and desperate attempts to escape. Interwoven episodes depict encounters with officials, a contest between religious conviction and practical common sense, conversions, miraculous healing, cholera, riots, a conspiracy of nihilists, and debates over reform. Two religious leaders—one from the community and one from the established church—alternately clash and cooperate as personal relationships, romances, moral choices, and public crises lead toward reckonings about faith, humanity, and migration to a freer land.