An unscrupulous businessman tries to win a government contract by playing up to the engineer assigned to review the project. He comes to the engineer's hotel room to offer him money, all the while secretly filming the proceedings with a hidden camera. Meanwhile the engineer, unhappily married to an alcoholic, uses the hotel room to continue his affair with the businessman's attractive young wife.

A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he's molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.