Set in 1949 New York, a Holocaust survivor (Ron Silver) who makes a living as a ghostwriter for a Jewish rabbi, finds himself involved with three women – his current wife (Margaret Sophie Stein), a passionate affair with a married woman (Lena Olin), and his long-vanished wife (Anjelica Huston) whom he thought was killed during the war and suddenly reappears. The film concentrates on the views of the Jewish survivors, who no longer abide by religious morales and question a God who could let the Holocaust occur.