In the summer of 1863, Adam Rosenzweig has left a Bavarian ghetto and sailed for America to join the Union Army. Fired by the revolutionary idealism of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, he hopes to aid a cause which he believes to be as simple as he knows it to be just. But thwarted by the discovery of a physical deformity which he had hoped to conceal, he must try other means to find his "truth."