The Housewives of Manheim

This is a nostalgic comic-drama that takes place in the extended community of a Brooklyn tenement in 1944. Four women on the home front discover new dimensions of love, friendship, and tolerance.

May Black is the neighborhood beauty, struggling with a growing restlessness. Alice Cohen is the local busy-body and self-proclaimed moral compass of the community. Both of their husbands are overseas fighting the Nazis. Billie Friedhoff is a bohemian and entrepreneur selling linens out of her apartment to make a better life for her son. These three women are part of a tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone else as well as everyone else’s business, and they are marking the days until the war is over and the men return. Every day has its unhurried rhythm with the women caring for their children, maintaining their households, visiting one another to catch up on gossip, borrowing coffee, trading ration cards and shopping at Waldbaum’s or Loehman’s. Into this carefully crafted world enters Sophie Birnbaum, an older woman who has fled the horrors of war-torn Europe. The sophisticated Sophie brings with her a view of life that the other women have been sheltered from, and her appearance on the scene threatens the delicate equilibrium that May, Billie and Alice have so skillfully created.