Free spirit Sonia longs to escape the restrictions of the community into which she was born--the tiny, hermetic cultural circle of the Brooklyn Hasidim--and rebels against her erudite but emotionally cold arranged husband by initiating two affairs: one with his jeweler brother, and one with a Puerto Rican outsider whose experience of life is miles apart from hers. Less an exploration of the conflicts between Hasidic tradition and modernity than a standard story of self-realization.