Ron Silver stars as Herman, a Holocaust survivor who believes that his wife Tamara (Anjelica Huston) perished in the concentration camps. He marries fellow immigrant Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), whose family sheltered him from the Nazis, and resettles in the Coney Island area of New York. Not all that devoted to Yadwiga, Herman begins an affair with Masha (Lena Olin), who becomes pregnant by him. Reasoning that, since Yadwiga is a gentile, his marriage is not legal in the eyes of his religion, Herman marries Masha as well. The triangle metamorphoses into a quadrangle when Tamara, who was not killed after all, reappears. Olin and Huston were both nominated for Best Supporting Actress Academy Awards.

Set in New York City in 1949, the story follows Holocaust survivor Herman Broder. Throughout the war he survived hidden in a hayloft, taken care of by his gentile Polish servant, Yadwiga, whom he later takes as his wife in America. Meanwhile, he has a passionate affair with another Holocaust survivor, Masha. To Yadwiga, he poses as a traveling book-salesman despite the fact he is a ghost writer for a corrupt rabbi. He wanders about New York with a constant paranoia and perpetual desperation, made more complicated when his first wife from Poland, Tamara, who was thought to have been killed in the Holocaust along with their two children, comes to New York.

Release Date: December 13, 1989


Distrib: 20th Century Fox


Boxoffice: $7,754,571 2014: $14,632,300