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Overview
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....Synopsis
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....
Commentary - Ruth R. Wisse
How very clever of Allegra Goodman to perceive in contemporary America the place and time in which a small group of Jews could finally be casual enough about the wrath of both God and history, yet attentive enough to social discipline instilled by their religion, to produce a context for the novel of manners.
Editorials
Newsday
This young Mozart of Jewish fiction has pulled off another major feat.Miami Herald
The kind of story that matters.Baltimore Sun
A thoroughly engrossing tale.Daphne Merkin
Allegra Goodman is young, poised and fearless . . . Kaaterskill Falls continues where her last book, The Family Markowitz, left off -- and then goes farther, cutting new ground. -- The New York Times Book ReviewRuth R. Wisse
How very clever of Allegra Goodman to perceive in contemporary America the place and time in which a small group of Jews could finally be casual enough about the wrath of both God and history, yet attentive enough to social discipline instilled by their religion, to produce a context for the novel of manners.— Commentary
Vanessa V. Friedman
Unsensational though its action isKaaterskill Falls is a sneaky celebration of the American dream. —Entertainment WeeklyLA Times Book Review
Not since Chaim Potok's The Chosen have readers been treated to such an intimate look at a closed Orthodox community. . . .A richly textured portrait.People Magazine
Like the late Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, Goodman wrings ineffable strands of passion from the quietest of hopes and disappointments. It is a carefully observed and haunting world.Washington Post Book World
Kaaterskill Falls manages the tricky business of giving equal weight to substance and style — and does so brilliantly. . . .What will strike readers is the way Goodman's novel makes the ultra Orthodox look simultaneously exotic and familiar.Gail Caldwell
She has wrought an entire world. . . .Goodman has taken a fecundity of insights to her first novel which depicts a panoply of characters — most of them Orthodox Jews — in their summer community in upstate New York.— The Boston Sunday Globe
Publishers Weekly -
The quiet wisdom expressed in this novel and the clear lucidity of its prose would make it a remarkable achievement for any writer. What is perhaps most impressive here is that its author is only in her early 30s and has already acquired the psychological perceptiveness and philosophic composure of someone of more mature years. The world that Goodman conjures here -- a small Orthodox Jewish sect who migrate every summer with their leader from New York's Washington Heights to the upstate community of Kaaterskill -- may initially seem exotic and remote to most readers, but the scrupulously rendered background of religious observance is the stage on which Goodman dramatizes the universality of human behavior.Beginning her narrative in July 1976 and ending it two years later, Goodman chronicles the small oscillations in the lives of some two dozen characters. There are other Jewish summer residents, more secular and of higher social status, whose families came to Kaaterskill before the advent of their more observant brethren. The old Yankee families watch with dismay the gradual loss of their property and the town's identity to these strange interlopers. And there are marginal figures who stand between them, notably an ambitious real estate developer who changed his name from Klein to King and is scorned by both communities. With insight, affection and gentle humor, Goodman builds her narrative with scenes of marital relationships, domestic routines, generational conflict, new love and old scandals. Quiet heartbreak occurs, too. Elizabeth Schulman, the much-admired, calmly devout mother of five daughters, almost enjoys the fulfillment of her ambition to do something special with her life until her business project is forbidden by rabbinical decree and she gains a new understanding of a woman's possibilities and limitations among her people. The dying Rav sees clearly the limitations of Isaiah, the dutiful son who will be his successor, and the brilliance of his prodigal son, Jeremy, who in turn finds that his intellectual rebellion has left him spiritually desolate. On the other hand, Holocaust survivor Andras Melish breaks through his anomie to a peaceful contemplation of his blessings.<>p>Goodman conveys her characters' religious convictions with a respectful but slightly skeptical eye. Her tenderly ironic understanding of human needs, ambitions and follies, of the stress between unbending moral laws and turbulent personal aspirations, gives the narrative perspective and balance. In knitting the minutiae of individual lives into the fabric of community, she produces a vibrant story of good people accommodating their spiritual and temporal needs to the realities of contemporary life. She does so with the virtuosic assurance of a prose stylist of the first rank.
Vanessa V. Friedman
Unsensational though its action is, Kaaterskill Falls is a sneaky celebration of the American dream. -- Entertainment WeeklyLaura Green
In Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman has moved away from the sparkling vignettes of her two previous books, Total Immersion (1989) and The Family Markowitz (1996), to focus on the accumulation of small changes in the lives of three Jewish families over the course of two summers in the Catskills. Kaaterskill Falls both re-creates a special place -- a rural Yankee community enlivened once a year by the arrival of the Jewish "summer people" -- and explores different ways of negotiating a Jewish heritage of tradition and loss.As the novel begins, Isaac Shulman and Andras Melish leave the heat of the city and wind their way into the Catskills until "the city is gone and the world is green." Isaac, his wife, Elizabeth, and their five daughters are followers of Rav Kirshner, the rabbi and charismatic leader of a strict Orthodox community. Elizabeth Shulman, although devout, has, at 34, begun to chafe gently against Kirshner's strictures. Andras Melish is a skeptical immigrant from Budapest, quietly estranged from his young, enthusiastic Argentine wife, who does not understand the allure of the secular, cultured, Eastern European past Andras shares with his older sisters. Forbidding old Rav Kirshner himself is failing in health, cared for with increasing difficulty by his dutiful but unimaginative son Isaiah and Isaiah's loyal wife; Kirshner must decide whether Isaiah or his other son, the brilliant but secular Jeremy, will inherit the leadership of the community.
The reader enters into the variously questioning minds not only of Elizabeth, Andras and the Rav, but also of Isaac, Isaiah, Jeremy, Andras' daughter Renee and the Shulmans' daughter Chani. Although this kaleidoscopic method echoes the diverse viewpoints in The Family Markowitz, Goodman artfully overlaps her characters' conflicts to ensure that this variety will create an impression of fullness, rather than fragmentation. For example, when Elizabeth's quest for a project of her own brings her up against the absolute authority of the Rav, it is the agnostic Andras who finds the words to help her. Only a late, melodramatic plot development involving an ambitious real estate developer and the local judge seems out of place.
The broad canvas does mute the reader's response to individual characters; we feel interest in many, but allegiance to none. To the extent that Goodman chooses a primary consciousness, it's Elizabeth's; most readers will easily sympathize with her desire for "the quick and subtle negotiations of the outside world." But Goodman refuses to make Kaaterskill Falls a story of individual triumph over stifling communal norms. At the novel's end, a minor character summarizes the lasting appeal of Kaaterskill: "We always felt safe here. We thought the summers would last forever. I remember looking up at the falls, and everything rushing and white and beautiful. You looked up there and you felt that you could do anything. That absolutely nothing could ever stop you." 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. Salon July 31, 1998