This film is made up of three segments that share no plot but have a general thematic relationship. In the first segment, Virginia and her three children are left by her shiftless husband and she is courted by an old beau who is now divorced. In the second, a divorced woman reacts to some unexpected revelations from her aged father. In the third, a childless, middle-aged social worker is swept into an affair with a young cab driver and finds herself pregnant.

A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he's molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.

A put-upon Jewish deli owner in Brooklyn dreams of getting out from underneath the thumb of his domineering father and his haughty fashion-model girlfriend by buying his own restaurant in midtown Manhattan.

In a pre-revolutionary Russia, a poor Jewish milkman struggles with the challenges of a changing world as his daughters fall in love and antisemitism grows.

In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon.

Wealthy, powerful sweatshop owner falls in love with employee's teenage daughter, who feels obligated to marry him after he shares his wealth with her parents, though she actually loves a young Marxist unionizer.

Zharko, leader of the Romanis in NYC, passes his position of leadership on to his unwilling grandson, Dave, leading to infighting between Dave and his father.

When a Jewish songstress is plucked from the stage and sent to Auschwitz, she and other musicians find themselves assigned to a terrible task—using their talents to soothe fellow prisoners who are sentenced to die in the gas chambers.

The story of a mentally handicapped middle-aged man and how he, and his elderly parents who must take care of him, manage to get along in New York City.

The younger son of a working-class Jewish family in Montreal, Duddy Kravitz yearns to make a name for himself in society. This film chronicles his short and dubious rise to power, as well as his changing relationships with family and friends. Along the way the film explores the themes of anti-semitism and the responsibilities which come with adulthood.