Set in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, it explores the situation of first- and second-generation Americans in the early 1950s as experienced by three main characters and the relationships among them: an aging Jewish refugee from the Russian Empire who owns and operates a failing small grocery store; a young Italian American drifter trying to overcome a bad start in life by becoming the grocer's assistant; and the grocer's daughter, who becomes romantically involved with her father's assistant despite parental objections and misgivings of her own.

Morris Bober, the 60-year-old proprietor of an old-fashioned grocery store, faces destitution as his customers abandon him in favor of more modernized shops.

Just at this time, Frank Alpine makes his appearance: a 25-year-old vagrant from the West Coast, raised in an orphanage after his father abandoned him.

Leaving an abusive foster home to live as a drifter, he makes his way East in hopes of finding opportunities to turn his life around.

Frank begins to haunt Morris' store and offers to work without pay as his assistant, claiming that this will give him experience he can use in a future job search.

The grocer, weakened by the assault and trying to recuperate without benefit of medical care, accepts and arranges for him to have room and board with the upstairs tenants, a young Italian-American couple, and provides him some pocket money.

The resulting increased income is being supplemented by Frank's surreptitiously returning, in discreet amounts, his share of the holdup take.

He justifies this to himself by claiming it as recompense for his contribution to the store's improved situation, and keeps an account of his petty theft with the intention of eventually returning it all.

During lulls in the work day the men's conversations touch upon philosophical and personal matters, and Frank privately struggles with his own ethical quandary.

While Morris is notably tolerant of others, Ida is worried by the young Italyener's proximity to the couple's 23-year-old daughter, Helen, single and living at home.

Helen is courted by the sons of the only other two Jews in the neighborhood, both young men with good financial prospects, but her dreams of a better life include true love.

She also aspires to higher education, but has set aside her own plans in order to take a job as a secretary, as her wages are needed to supplement the family's meager income from the store.

When he is hospitalized after inhaling gas from a radiator he failed to light (claiming afterwards that this was not deliberate), Frank comes back to run the store over Ida's protests.