As a young girl in the Pale of Settlement, Fanny Keismann learned her father's profession of ritual slaughterer and became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that profession—she's now the wife of a cheesemaker and a mother of five—Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg. It might come in handy when, traveling alone in czarist Russia, she sets off to track down her sister's runaway husband and bring him home, aided by a mute and mysterious ferryman with his own sensational past.