A social portrait of Jewish immigrants in New York that follows a young man who rapidly adopts American habits and English while others remain tied to Old World ways. Employed in a garment shop, he boasts of his assimilation, courts modern pleasures, and confronts conflicts over marriage, family expectations, and communal authority. Scenes in workshops, crowded tenements, and social gatherings reveal tensions between ambition and tradition, intimate disappointments, and moral compromises, with the story using detailed neighborhood observation to explore identity, language, and the costs of trying to become American.