Partos Alekseevich Paramonov (Paramosha) worked in the circus as a clown. His wife died and he began to drink too much. Paramoshi left a porcelain figurine on a golden pedestal from a past life. Once there was a phone call and a woman's voice, invited the old man to speak at the bottom of the city. Paramosha went to a stop and waited a long time for the coveted black Mercedes from the city hall, but the call was just an insidious ploy of friends who wanted to lure Paramosha out of the apartment and take possession of the figurine.
Mother is eighty, Seva - sixty.That's the whole family right there. Seva spent his life looking after his mother. While he was at her beck and call, he barely had any time for himself and ended up childless with no soul to turn to. The inevitable happens - mother dies. Without her life loses its meaning. On top of this he finds out the story about his birth. The unbearable truth turns his life upside-down. Questions keep piling on. How to forgive? How to find humility and the strength to carry on?
This charming comedy tracks the lives of several romantic pairs through trials and tribulations. The main focus of the story is a young soldier with a good heart but little ambition and his fiancée, who feels torn when a charming and sophisticated intellectual enters her life and sweeps her off her feet. There are also several side stories, also all dealing with relationships, most significantly the soldier's mother, whose comfortable but unexceptional marriage is threatened when a past love returns to her life.
In Russia at the turn of the century, a wealthy Jewish merchant enjoys the best of relations with his Russian neighbours, while his respected home forms the obvious social centre of the entire community. However, the atmosphere grows more tense as the local authorities come under pressure to fall in line with the officially sanctioned anti-Semitic policies of the Tsarist Government. The village elder is one of our hero's best friends and together they seem to find a way to outwit these evil intentions but unfortunately they fail to understand what forces they are dealing with in a country where anti-Semitism is state policy.
