A man reads a book. Ordinary enough, except that he is sentenced to death and scheduled to be shot in ten minutes. Obviously, he will not get to the end of the story. Based on an unfinished short story by Arthur Schnitzler.
The criminalist Hannes Bergemann tries to blackmail the city where he spent his youth. After many years returning to the familiar places of his childhood, he hopes to meet again his old friends, especially Fred, Helmuth and Richard, with whom he had a close childhood friendship.
A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.
A young half-breed boy, the son of a hockey player and an Indian woman, is adopted by a Jewish shopkeeper, but finds himself torn between the different cultures with which he comes into contact.