At the beginning of the First Crusade in the year 1096, bands of marauding Crusader knights attack and massacre Jewish communities across the Rhineland in Germany. Yet one of the victims, a wine merchant from Worms who had lost his wife and son, receives a second chance at life: a magical fairy named Melusine brings him back to life and offers him a way out of the travails of Jewish history. If Reuven will love and marry her, then she will make him a wealthy and powerful Christian lord with vast estates and heroic and bold warrior sons. In despair he agrees, but then learns over time that he cannot so easily abandon the tragedy that destroyed his community. In the end, he must choose between the pleasures of the fairy's magical gifts and the pull of searing memory.