(1989) Based on Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, this movie of many emotions comprising human nature tells the complex story of a lost man who cannot decide, from director/producer/co-screenwriter Paul Mazursky (who also plays the part of Leon Tortshiner). Herman Broder (Ron Silver) is a Jewish ghostwriter for Rabbi Lembeck (Alan King), a wealthy landowner in New York City with homes for the aged in Florida and California; but he tells his simple-minded, gentile Polish wife Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein) that he sells books on the road so that he can be away from her with Masha (Lena Olin), his mistress.

It is 1949 in Brooklyn, a decade after Yadwiga, a peasant girl and the Broders' servant, saved Herman's life, hiding him from the Nazis in a hayloft in Poland while his wife and two children were taken away and shot. On a holiday to Coney Island, Yadzia exclaims: "I'm so happy. So lucky. God himself has sent you to me."

Changeable of mood (occasionally hysterical) and suspicious of her lover, Masha, a deserted wife, lives with her mother, both of whom survived the death camp at Dachau; "God doesn't care," she says to Herman (haunted by memories), who replies: "Maybe suffering is a natural attribute of God."

Masha's mother points out a notice in the newspaper of someone looking for Herman. On the Lower East Side, Herman goes to the address of a flat where Reb Abraham greets him with a declaration: "A miracle…. Your wife has returned!" As if risen from the dead, Tamara (Angelica Huston) explains how after being struck twice with bullets she climbed over corpses at night in the rain to escape, eventually finding refuge in Russia.

Soon they are arguing. After listening to Herman relate his present situation of having a wife and a mistress, Tamara says: "I see nothing has changed with you."

While a song's lyrics urge "make up your mind," Herman groans that the Talmud doesn't tell a man what he should do with two wives, let alone three. In the Catskills with Herman, Masha tells him she thinks she's pregnant; her mother says she wants a grandchild: "someone to name for the murdered Jews." Calling him a "pathological liar," Masha refuses to believe Herman when he says his first wife has come back, instead assuming he's seeing another woman; at home with sweet, uncomplaining, servile Yadzia, who is attempting to learn the ways of becoming a Jewess, on the Sabbath Herman denies God's existence.

Faced with a tightening knot of entanglements, Herman refuses to divorce Yadwiga (who becomes pregnant) or to leave Masha (only making matters worse by agreeing to marry her in a Jewish ceremony) and declines Tamara's offer (she makes no claims upon him) to manage his life for him.

Leon Tortshiner, Masha's estranged husband, meets with Herman to say that Masha paid for her divorce from him by prostitution. "Men love virgins," Tamara tells Herman: "If every man had his way, every woman would lie down a prostitute and get up a virgin." There's one advantage to being dead, reflects Herman, in that one no longer has to make decisions; but Herman is afraid of God.

(Referring to the scene when Herman enters Reb Abraham's apartment to confront the fact of Tamara's being alive, Steven Pinker concludes The Blank Slate with insightful commentary on Singer's novel and Mazursky's film adaptation: "What a wealth of psychology is folded into that scene! Men's inclination to polygamy and the frustrations it inevitably brings. Women's keener social intelligence and their preference for verbal over physical aggression against romantic rivals. The stability of personality over the lifespan. The way that social behavior is elicited by the specifics of a situation, especially the specifics of other people, so that two people play out the same dynamic whenever they are together…. It is a scene that has the voice of the species in it: that infuriating, endearing, mysterious, predictable, and eternally fascinating thing we call human nature.")

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