Lily Kovn­er, nick­named the Jew­ish Miss Marple, acci­den­tal­ly spies a famil­iar-look­ing paint­ing hang­ing in the unlike­ly set­ting of a shab­by restau­rant in Vat­i­can City. Simon Rieger, her sig­nif­i­cant oth­er, has been sum­moned to exam­ine a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown man­u­script, attrib­uted to a famous Tal­mu­dic schol­ar, unac­count­ably stored there. The sus­pi­cious death of the priest who invit­ed Simon to eval­u­ate the man­u­script and the dis­ap­pear­ance of both items lead Lily and Simon to Lviv Ukraine, new­ly freed from Sovi­et rule, but a city lack­ing ves­tiges of the vibrant Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty that thrived there for cen­turies before World War II and iso­la­tion behind the Iron Curtain. 

Lily recalls her one pre-war child­hood vis­it to this city, then known as Lvov, Poland, and won­ders if any of the rel­a­tives she met sur­vived the Holo­caust. The trail of the man­u­script and paint­ing pro­vides ear­ly clues. Ulti­mate­ly, the path reveals a mod­ern woman’s saga of soli­tary resiliance, despite the treach­ery of per­pe­tra­tors pro­fess­ing to be holy that mir­rors a cen­turies-old local leg­end of a Jew­ish hero­ine who saved a land­mark synagogue.