A Jewish boy grows up in 1920s Montreal with a grandfather who tells stories and a father who won't work.

In 1905 Hungary, a young village woman has just undergone a marriage to the spoiled son of a man to whom her father is indebted, in order that the debt be cancelled, only to be spirited away by her true love, a young peasant, by whom she soon becomes pregnant. Together they attempt to find a way to buy up her father's debt and also pay for a divorce from her husband, against various odds.

A Hungarian soldier returning from fighting in the Second World War marries the woman he believes to be the widow of a former comrade who he thinks died in the POW camp in which they were held.

After a heart attack, landowner Ferdinand Kerekházy summons his son Ferko Kerekházy from abroad, who, to his conservative father's dismay, sends a wagonload of machines ahead to set up an irrigation system and turn the saline, barely productive fields into fertile ones. The old count doesn't want to hear about his son's plans, and wants Ferko to marry Baroness Zólyomi. Since his son refuses, he di...

A Jewish boy grows up in 1920s Montreal with a grandfather who tells stories and a father who won't work.