Forty-seven years before the Hayes Street well is opened, Moshe Ludlow, a young Jewish theater manager in Pottstown, cleans up after major music bookings at his small All-American Dance Hall and Theater. He prides himself on drawing touring acts like Chick Webb and, more recently, the temperamental klezmer star Mickey Katz, and he uses his gift for persuasion to calm anxious travelers and an unruly, snowbound crowd.

Moshe’s promotion effort nearly collapses when his multilingual flyers are misrouted and misunderstood across Jewish communities, culminating in a disastrous Baltimore newspaper advertisement that mangles his meaning into a threatening line about “Watch the Jews burn and dance.” Fear and suspicion kill advance sales, and Moshe falls deep into debt to his cousin Isaac, fearing the concert will ruin him.

Desperate, Moshe mopes in the back storeroom of the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store on Chicken Hill, where Rabbi Yakov Flohr lets him study Hebrew. There Moshe grows close to Yakov’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Chona, who works despite a polio disability and proves witty, warm, and devout. Chona breaks rules to guide Moshe to the Midrash Rabbah and reads him the story of infant Moses choosing burning coals over jewels, a lesson about survival, sacrifice, and providence that steadies Moshe and deepens his feelings for her.

Within weeks Moshe proposes to Chona, and she accepts; Yakov and his wife joyfully agree to the match. They marry modestly at Ahavat Achim with a scraped-together minyan, including two railroad workers who demand cab fare, which Moshe pays gladly. Re-energized, Moshe sells his car, borrows more from Isaac, places proper advertisements, and ticket sales surge; the Mickey Katz run becomes four nights of packed, exuberant dancing and profit.

The morning after, Moshe sees a standout Hasidic dancer—now partly “modernized” in dress—heading for the train station. The man silently gifts Moshe a bottle of slivovitz, refuses the idea of needing a wife, and then both hear a sharp pop and see a small puff of black smoke rising from Chicken Hill. The dancer calls it “a bad sign” and disappears before Moshe can learn his name.