On the roof of Gusta Katz's tower on Manhattan's Upper West Side the tenants are gathered for a holiday meal. It is autumn 1993. Each has a story to tell.

Calev 'Charlie' Levine cannot go home. What caused Martin Sommers' engagement to implode? Will Toby Kassman give in to forbidden passion? What will Sam Geffen learn from his guest from hell? What long-held secret will Leslie Aronowitz's mother reveal...after her death?

Tales of conflict and love; of family discovery, dating, marriage, dysfunctional relationships, escape from and return to religion. From a shocking holocaust revelation...

Alice Portman is 32, marketing director for the trendy fashion magazine, Femme Moderne. Petite, glamorous, lonely, progressively alcoholic and increasingly unable to make decisions, Alice returns home one night to her upscale Upper West Side coop to find that the man she almost married three years before has moved down the hall with his wife and nine-month-old baby daughter. That weekend, in an unrelated incident, Mitchell Jaffe, a 34 year-old attorney, who in his 20s was a modern orthodox Jew and who is now divorced and secular, slaps his elder daughter across the face in a kosher pizzeria...