One of the last Yiddish films made in Poland before the Nazi invasion, this film tells the story of a mother's persistent struggles to support her three children in pre-war World War II Polish Ukraine. After her family is pulled apart by severe poverty and the turmoil of war, she and her children make their way to New York and turn to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for help.

A wife returns home after having been shipwrecked for several years and finds that her husband has remarried, and his new wife is a lazy, gold-digging tramp.