Kaaterskill Falls
by Allegra Goodman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Allegra GoodmanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-08-10
ISBN: 0385323905
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Delta
Book Reviews of Kaaterskill Falls
Book Review: A good book, but not a textbook
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Kaaterskill Falls for school last year, and while I thought it was a good book, I wouldn't advise that te reader accepts the details about daily Jewish life as the way thigs are for all Jews. Goodman's desciptions of the way characters grow in many ways in beautiful, and realistic. But, there are many Orthadox Jewish communities that are very different from the Kirshners. Often, the Rav does not control every minute detail of the lives of his congregants. And about the status of woman, there are many jewish women who work outside the home, often at jobs that require college degrees, because with families that large, two incomes are often necessary. Also, certain slip ups that Goodman made about Orthadox Judaism suggests she is writing from an outside perspective. For example, when the Rav tells Elizabeth to close her store, either there would have been a third person in the room with him, or the door would have been left open, because of a law called Isur Yichud, which forbids an unrelated man and woman to be in the same room alone. Also, Goodman seemed unfamiliar with the way Rabbis reach decisions. Being bullied by their wives or anooyed by congregants does not count. In a real life situation, Elizabeth probably would have been told not to cater parties with non-kosher food, but the store would not have closed unless the Rav could base his arguments on legal writings such as the talmud, not petty immaturity. But I suppose it makes a good plot device. All in all, its a good book. But don't consider the religiosity of the Kirshners to be like that of all Othadox Jews.
Summary of Kaaterskill Falls
In the summer of '76, the Shulmans and the Melishes migrate to Kaaterskill, the tiny town in upstate New York where Orthodox Jews and Yankee year-rounders live side by side from June through August. Elizabeth Shulman, a devout follower of Rav Elijah Kirshner and the mother of five daughters, is restless. She needs a project of her own, outside her family and her cloistered community. Across the street, Andras Melish is drawn to Kaaterskill by his adoring older sisters, bound to him by their loss and wrenching escape from the Holocaust. Both comforted and crippled by his sisters' love, Andras cannot overcome the ambivalence he feels toward his children and his own beautiful wife. At the top of the hill, Rav Kirshner is coming to the end of his life, and he struggles to decide which of his sons should succeed him: the pious but stolid Isaiah, or the brilliant but worldly Jeremy. Behind the scenes, alarmed as his beloved Kaaterskill is overdeveloped by Michael King, the local real estate broker, Judge Miles Taylor keeps an old secret in check, biding his time....Allegra Goodman's remarkable first novel intertwines the stories of three Orthodox Jewish families, each of whom is tugged between religious tradition and the secular world. The story takes place in the upstate New York town of Kaaterskill, summer Mecca for the tightly knit Kirshner sect. Model wife and mother Elizabeth Shulman pictures her community as a sort of Mont-Saint-Michel, an island both joined and separated from the outside world as if by rising and falling tides. Fascinated with what lies on the spiritual mainland, she hides behind the reassuring rhythms of religious observance, though she's inspired with a "desire, as intense as prayer," to create something all her own.
Despite her pious husband's doubts, she does, in the form of a store catering to Kaaterskill's "summer people"--a community Goodman brings memorably to life. The Shulmans' neighbor Andras Melish, a Hungarian who fled World War II and a vanished world of assimilated European Jewry, struggles to understand his young Argentinian wife Nina, whose need for tradition grows with each passing year. The ailing Rav Kirshner must decide which son will carry on in his shoes: dutiful but plodding Isaiah or his brilliant but secular brother Jeremy. Andras and Nina's daughter befriends an Arab girl, while Elizabeth and Isaac's daughter dreams in secret of Israel. Meanwhile, the town's year-round residents observe the Orthodox newcomers with bewilderment and occasional dismay.
As she proved in a warm and funny 1996 collection of stories, The Family Markowitz, Goodman is an unparalleled observer of human nature. Here, she charts with quiet assurance the daily rhythms of Kaaterskill: the meals prepared and eaten, the Holy Days observed, the ebb and flow of married life. Goodman gets all the important details right; her children's dialogue, for instance, is unerring. Above all, however, she brings to the subject of religious life a seriousness and subtlety rarely found in recent fiction. Wise was the word used again and again to describe The Family Markowitz. Applied to Kaaterskill Falls, it is no less apt.
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