As a young boy in Jersey City in the 1950s, Lipa Wallerstein's whole world consists of his father's small synagogue on the bottom floor of their ramshackle house. With no Jewish friends nearby and a family that doesn't take much interest in him, Lipa finds himself alone more often than not- but always in the company of his fertile imagination- and his one burning ambition: to study from an old set of Mishnayos left by his grandfather, a great tzaddik. But when he opens a volume and peers at the page, he cannot understand a word it says.