Eli Eli

Mendel and Hannah Shapiro, an elderly Jewish couple who run a small farm in New Jersey, must get money to meet their mortgage payment to the bank by the next day to keep their farm. Mendel calls their children, Mollie, in Philadelphia, and Morris, in New York, to come right away. His neighbor Michel believes that most children do not properly care for their parents and insinuates that Mendel's children would not come to visit if they knew that their parents needed money. Mendel, however, assures Michel that children are the best investment one can make. Michel's cynicism proves to be prescient when Morris, a doctor, explains that he has used Mendel's money to fix up his office and to bring two relatives from Europe and suggests that his parents sell their farm and live apart, one with each of their children. Although Mendel and Hannah, having lived together for fifty-five years, are shocked at the suggestion, they sadly agree to comply. After three months with Mollie and her husband Harold in Philadelphia, Mendel, in a letter to Michel, acknowledges that he was right about children, while Hannah, now very lonely living in New York with Morris and his wife Jennie, imagines her husband calling her. Michel visits Mendel and, after assuring him that his house will always be open to him, insists Mendel take a loan of fifty dollars. The next day, when Mollie, who continually nags her father, questions him about the source of the money that he used to buy a lottery ticket from one of his old friends, Mendel angrily tells her to mind her own business. Meanwhile, in New York, Jennie berates Hannah for taking a birthday gift to Morris at his office, and Hannah is disheartened that she is not invited to the birthday celebration for her son given by Jennie's snooty mother. In Philadelphia, when Mollie finds the rent money missing, she accuses her father of being a thief. Mollie sends for Morris, who sadly arranges for Mendel to be admitted to an Old Folks' Home. In New York, Hannah hallucinates that she is a young mother, and she is put into a sanitarium. Meanwhile, when Mollie and Harold's indolent son Danny learns that his grandfather has been sent away for stealing, he confesses that he took the money for a weekend trip to Atlantic City. Worried that Hannah has not written recently, Mendel travels to New York. With Morris, he visits his wife, who babbles about her beautiful baby. When the doctor suggests that the atmosphere of their old home might help Hannah, Mendel returns to New Jersey to ask Michel for help and finds that Michel died six months earlier and made him heir to his farm. Sometime later, Mendel happily feeds his chickens, while Hannah prepares a meal for their visiting children. Danny, who now milks ten cows in half an hour, has reformed due to farm life and stands to inherit the farm. Morris, who has left an important conference to come, arrives with Jennie, Mollie and Harold, and Hannah asserts that children are, in fact, worthwhile. After the meal, when Hannah learns that unless Morris gets $2,000, he will lose his home, she convinces Mendel to go to the bank to get the money for their son.