Awake and Sing

Living together in a cramped Bronx tenement and laid low by the Great Depression, a working-class Jewish family copes with financial hardship and dreams of a brighter future. Indomitable Bessie Berger rules her family with an iron hand including her nebbish husband Myron, her children Ralph and Hennie, her Marxist-leaning father Jacob and the boarder Moe Axelrod, a small-time bookie embittered over losing a leg in World War I. Bent on forcing her daughter into a marriage of convenience and her son out of a relationship that she considers beneath him, Bessie tirelessly wages war against the idealism of the family she is trying to protect.