Among the American emigrants at the end of the 19th century are the watchmaker Simon Kantor with his wife Ruth and their nine-year-old son Daniel, who escaped a pogrom in Russia at the last moment; the storyteller and HAPAG recruiter Tatlin, who helped fleeing recruits obtain false papers and is therefore fleeing to America himself; Klaus Groth, the son of a shipyard worker from Hamburg, who returns to Hamburg after his military service; the freshly graduated doctor Albert Werth, scion of an old Sephardic family, who turns down a promising marriage with a banker’s daughter to work as a ship's doctor; and Alma Laufer, a nun who has been a missionary in Southwest Africa. They all meet in Hamburg in 1892, the year of the cholera epidemic. What they share is an uncertain future and the mere hope for a better life elsewhere.