An ascetic-quixoticyeshiva student sets out to the countryside in search of "true Jews"-those whose spirit is the moreprofound for their connection to the land, unadulterated by the evils of city life. He finds that and more, ashe becomes the quarry of two farm families who want him for their children's tutor-and ultimately for ason-in-law. Quite in spite of himself the dreamy pedant (Michael Goldstein) inspires a variety of desires inhis young charges, including a lust for learning in the irrepressible Tsine (Helen Beverly) and her wide-eyedbrother Avrem-Yankl (a young Herschel Bernardi). The play that, in its lyric naturalism, was thecornerstone of post-World War I Yiddish theater became the most celebrated of Yiddish talkies as adaptedby Edgar G. Ulmer, who did not speak Yiddish, and theater director/actor Jacob Ben-Ami, who mostdefinitely did, and is credited with casting the film and giving it its "authentic flavor." On the other hand,who but Ulmer-whose stylish, expressionist Hollywood films, shot independently and on the cheap, madehim the "King of the B's"-could have transformed New Jersey locations and a New York studio set into thebucolic-rustic landscape of Old Russia, with its delicately balanced relationships, that we experience in thisfilm? "Green Fields celebrates a vanished world of tribal wholeness and stubborn piety...Sweet butunsentimental, the film exudes a dreamy pantheism unique in Yiddish cinema" (J. Hoberman). An enormouscritical and box-office success in the U.S., the film won the French equivalent of the Oscar for 1938.