An ascetic-quixotic yeshiva student sets out in search of “true Jews”-those whose spirit is the more profound for their connection to the land, unadulterated by the evils of city life. He finds that and more, as he becomes the quarry of two farm families who want him for their children's tutor. The romantic pedant (Michael Goldstein) inspires a variety of desires including a lust for learning in the irrepressible Tsine (Helen Beverly) and her wide-eyed brother Avrem-Yankl (Herschel Bernardi). Theater director/actor Jacob Ben-Ami, brought in because Ulmer did not speak Yiddish, is credited with giving the film its “authentic flavor.” On the other hand, who but Ulmer could have transformed New Jersey locations and a New York studio set into bucolic, rustic Old Russia, with its delicately balanced relationships? “Green Fields celebrates a vanished world of tribal wholeness and stubborn piety....Sweet but unsentimental, the film exudes a dreamy pantheism unique in Yiddish film” (J. Hoberman).