Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

The penultimate meeting in SSU’s Jewish Literature Reading and Discussion Series will be this Thursday, November 13. Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls will provide the basis for the lecture and discussion. The book’s jacket describes the work like this:

Kaaterskill is the tiny town in upstate New York where Orthodox summer people and Yankee year-rounders live side by side from June through August. It is the summer of 1976, and Elizabeth Shulman, a devout follower of Rav Elijah Kirshner and the mother of five daughters, is restless. Across the street, Andras Melish is drawn to Kaaterskill by his adoring older sisters, the only members of his family to survive the Holocaust. Comforted, yet crippled by his sisters’ love, Andras cannot overcome the ambivalence he feels toward his own children and his beautiful young 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…

I haven’t read the book itself, but read several reviews. Let me share them with you

• At Salon.com Laura Green, an assistant professor of English at Yale ends her analytical summary with these words, “Goodman acknowledges the demands and rigidities of the Orthodox world, but “Kaaterskill Falls” celebrates the safety, comfort and quiet beauty of a community bound by tradition.”
• At the Yiddish Book Center, Judy Bolton-Fasman states that it “is a robust novel with nineteenth-century roots and late-twentieth-century sensibilities.” Besides a very short excerpt, you can find 10 questions there to ponder upon
• Peter Ritter at CityPage think of the book as “a window into the nuanced world of these “summer people,” a group caught between orthodox Judaism and the allure of modern America.“
• Finally, I recommend the publisher’s, Random House site, because you can read a short bio of the author and a longer (but narrowly formatted excerpt from the book there.