The year 1940 is drawing to a close. Hardened at Moscow University to the same steel as Comrade Stalin, the director of a Kyiv school commissions a young, frail, lame, and half-blind Jewish mathematics teacher, Yasha Shapiro, to stage a modern Soviet production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Yasha’s actors perform the scene where Romeo and Juliet meet on Juliet’s balcony and kiss at the school formal. In his production, Juliet is a Jewish girl from a bourgeois family, and Romeo is a Red Army soldier.
The school director fires Yasha, accusing him of anti-Soviet propaganda, and threatens to report him to the Soviet security services. In her opinion, a Red Army soldier who fights the bourgeoisie can’t fall in love with a girl from a bourgeois family, let alone a Jewish one. Moreover, the play is staged in Ukrainian, a language Comrade Stalin doesn’t speak. Yasha and his parents, Misha and Sara, realize that they and their young daughters face imprisonment, from which Jews are not released alive, and decide to separate and flee Kyiv. Yasha travels to a distant Siberian city to work in his profession, while his family goes to Misha’s homeland in Belarus. Before parting, Misha asks Yasha to promise that, God forbid, he will never marry a non-Jewish woman, never forget his Jewish identity, and Yasha promises this to him.
On the train, Yasha is robbed and left without documents, money, and clothes. At the final stop, in the city, he is mistaken for a thief, arrested, and threatened with death. Yasha escapes from the guards and jumps into the back of a truck, where he meets Ustinya, a girl returning from the city to her village. A local church minister shelters Yasha in his home, teaches him Christian prayers, and gives him a deacon’s cassock. Yasha serves in the church and enjoys it.
Ustinya, who has never attended before, now never misses a day. Love blossoms between Yasha and Ustinya. Ustinya’s parents firmly believe that all Jews are devils who drink the blood of Christian infants and would rather kill their daughter than give her in marriage to a Jew. Ustinya and Yasha decide to flee the village, somewhere far away and forever.
World War II is already in Belarus and Ukraine. There’s no radio in the village, so Yasha goes into town to find out what’s going on and buy newspapers. The policeman who once arrested Yasha pursues and shoots him. Yasha jumps onto a freight car carrying Red Army soldiers to war and unwittingly becomes a soldier.
Ustinya, unable to bear being separated from Yasha, steals her mother’s money and, carrying a duffel bag, rushes off to find him. She is certain only that she will find him, that he loves her, and that they will marry.