Jacob Kalich

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.

Morris Brown, a New York gambler acquainted more with his checkbook than his prayer book, returns to Galicia with his very American daughter, Mollie (Molly Picon) for a family wedding. But Mollie, whose exuberant antics fill the film, unexpectedly meets her match--an engaging young yeshiva scholar who forsake tradition and joins the secular world to win her heart.

Mamele embraces the entire gamut of interwar Jewish life in Lodz--tenements and unemployed Jews, nightclubs and gangsters, religious Jews celebrating sukkot--but the film belongs to Molly Picon who romps undaunted through her dutiful daughter role saving siblings, keeping the family intact, singing and acting her way through the stages of a woman's life from childhood to old age.