The hero is Aharon, a tailor who fell on hard times and became the beadle of the tailors' beit midrash. AZR paints in fine detail a life of poverty and humiliation, but also of great love: for his learned son, for his grandchildren who play with him on the Sabbath, and above all for the beit midrash itself, which he loves as a living creature.
"The beit midrash was in his eyes not a thing without breath of life but a beloved child, for which his soul longed with love and tenderness. Every new book, every new cloth, every ornament and adornment brought him endless joy." AZR, "On the Sanctification of the Name" (story), from "Collected Writings."
While the slaughter rages through the town, the householders flee. Aharon remains at his post, torn between his worry for his son and grandchildren and his refusal to abandon the Torah scrolls. His prayer turns into a sincere cry to heaven.
"I am guarding your beit midrash, Master of the Universe, and You, Guardian of Israel, why do You not guard the remnant of Your people?... Our fathers sanctified the Name of Heaven, ascended the pyre, stretched out their necks to the slaughter... and they, the holy ones, then brought life to the world through their death. And now what? Now they simply kill." Ibid.
He decides to remain: "sacred objects had been entrusted to his hand, and it was his duty to guard them as long as the breath of life was in him."
The rioters break in, and at their head, of all people, is Mikhaila, the "Shabbos goy" who had always kindled the beit midrash's candles. The old and feeble Aharon straightens himself up, snatches a pole from the wedding canopy, and stands to defend the Holy Ark.
"Away from here! I will smash the skull of anyone who comes near this place!" Ibid.
A large stone flies through the window and strikes his head.
"The old beadle fell to the ground before the Ark. What happened afterward he neither saw nor ever knew again!" Ibid.
AZR inverts the concept of "sanctification of the Name": not the martyrdom of dying for one's faith at the hands of coercers, but the faithfulness unto death of a simple man to a value entrusted to him. He also refuses to divide the world easily into good and evil: the traitor is the townsman (the fleeing gabbai), and the killer is yesterday's "honest gentile," while the hero is the despised beadle. This is the moral realism that whitewashes no one (compare "AZR the Storyteller").