A Bintel Brif.

New York City€™s Lower East Side on the eve of WWI. Abraham Cahan, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Daily Forward, receives a letter addressed to his €œBintel Brif€ column from a twenty-three-year-old girl who confesses to living in sin with her uncle and seeks his advice. The girl€™s description of her plight inflames Cahan€™s imagination; the enclosed photograph, a young woman in a white cotton shift gazing languidly up at the camera from her bed, overwhelms him with desire. €œPeering at the photograph, wondering if her slackened, unprotected presentation of herself was the aftermath of a feverish embrace, Cahan felt a ghostly invisible presence possess him, settling into the emptiness in his soul.€ Thus begins the drama of a righteous man€™s struggle to free himself from an obsession that threatens to destroy him and mortally wound his family. Desperate to fathom the mystery of her power, Cahan explores the girl€™s past only to discover that her st