Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman and The Jewish American Novel: A Review of Kaaterskill Falls by Judy Bolton-Fasman.

Kaaterskill Falls is a robust novel with nineteenth-century roots and late-twentieth-century sensibilities. The book opens in 1976 and takes place over two summers in the small Catskills town of the title. In Goodman's fictional recreation, Kaaterskill Falls is a place where various segments of American Jewish society come together. Goodman deftly shows that during the summer of 1976 the interplay between individuals and their communities was particularly intense for American Jews as they celebrated America's bicentennial and Israel's courage at Entebbe.

Kaaterskill Falls is also the summer retreat for followers of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect called the Kirshners. The Kirshners relocate annually from Washington Heights in upper Manhattan to bungalows in bucolic Kaaterskill Falls that were purchased with German reparations. There they live in close proximity to each other as well as to less observant Jews who summer nearby. They are aware of the non-Jews who live in the town all year-round. This is not the Borscht Belt of the western Catskills, but its eastern region – a place of rugged beauty that was once home to the Hudson River school of painters.

The Kirshners are devout followers of Rav Elijah Kirshner, who is not a Hasidic rabbi and is, in fact, decidedly rational when it comes to interpreting religious matters. Goodman writes that “there are Hasidic rebbes who tie their handkerchiefs to their fingers as they speak of certain things – thus to keep their ascending spirits tied to the ground. Rav Kirshner's handkerchief remains folded in his pocket, starched and ironed. He is no mystic. He is a rationalist, interested in law not myth."

Goodman's first book, a collection of short stories entitled Total Immersion, was published in 1989 when she was just 22. The stories were a bellwether for the direction in which Jewish American fiction was headed. Although many stories featured Jews in exotic locales, such as Hawaii, most of the characters grappled with age-old issues about the purpose of religious observance, the fine line between tradition and progress, and the meaning of prayer and belief. Goodman consistently made the familiar new and fresh, and even included a glossary of Yiddish, Hebrew and Hawaiian words.

Goodman's work clearly did not spring from the kind of post-World War II fiction that depicted Jewish life as embedded in the dominant American culture. Instead, regard for Jewish tradition and knowledge of Jewish text are integral to her work. With Cynthia Ozick as doyenne, women writers like Rebecca Goldstein, Pearl Abraham, and Allegra Goodman reinvigorated the mostly male Jewish novel of the 1950s. They also inspired a new generation of women writers that includes Dara Horn, Nicole Krauss and Rachel Kadish.

Published almost a decade after her first book, Goodman's second short story collection, The Family Markowitz, focused on the life and times of the aging Rose Markowitz, a character who appeared earlier in Total Immersion. Throughout The Family Markowitz, Goodman illuminated the larger tribulations and contradictions of American Jewish life through an accretion of small but crucial details.

Goodman's genius for shaping large themes from myriad details is critical to Elizabeth Schulman's transformation in Kaaterskill Falls. The British-born Elizabeth is a dutiful Orthodox woman, a mother of six daughters. She is married to Isaac, an earnest, somewhat dull follower of Rav Kirshner. Elizabeth, however, distinguishes herself as an independent thinker – a voracious reader of Jane Austen, John Milton and Anthony Trollope. Honing her intellect and reading the classics of English literature is a Herculean accomplishment in Elizabeth's intensely domestic and culturally insular world.

Goodman masterfully conveys Elizabeth's complex inner life as she remains within the Kirshner fold. When she is unexpectedly moved by the secular world she struggles to integrate it with her experience. Elizabeth experiences an epiphany “as intense as prayer” while viewing Thomas Coles' painting “Kaaterskill Falls”: then and there she realizes that she wants to open a kosher grocery store in the town. It is a deceptively simple yet astonishing revelation for Elizabeth – one that enables her to continue to live as a Kirshner woman while engaging in business. This new independence, however, will lead her to bump up against the very restrictions that she tries to integrate into her existing life.

Up to that point, the secular world has been a fairytale backdrop for Elizabeth, a place from which she finds English names for her daughters that they will never use. Elizabeth's small act of defiance points to the “futures she had imagined for her daughters. What careers. They seem in retrospect like wild fantasies. She gave her girls English names, grand, she thought, sophisticated…. On the edges of their beds she used to dream about her daughters; she used to spin lives for them out of books.”

Then there are other books like “her tiny siddur [prayer book], its pages thin as flaky pastry,” which are a stark contrast to Rav Kirshner's expansive library of pre-war books on philosophy, theology and literature. Before the Holocaust, the German-born Rav encouraged his followers to become equally adept at interpreting Shakespeare and Talmud. In post-Holocaust America however, he realizes he has created a community based on loss and grief. The result is a generation dogmatic in their observance of Torah and alienated from the culture around them. “They are born now,” he observes, “with the severity within them, although they do not know it.”

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jewish American fiction embracing identity and tradition curiously blooms in a climate where many Jews intermarry and many are unaffiliated with Jewish institutions. This fiction nourishes Jews on the periphery while responding to a renaissance of American Jewish life and observance. On the surface these two phenomena may seem at odds. But Allegra Goodman has found common ground between them and brilliantly merged disparate Jewish experiences in a great American novel.

Excerpt from Kaaterskill Falls

This love of the outside world is a kind of voyeurism for Elizabeth, and realizing that, she is dissatisfied. If she could do more than watch; if she could participate – do something or create something in the shimmering, spinning secular world. If she could move outside the fixed and constant realm in which she lives. But, of course, without giving it up, without exchanging it. Her religious life is not something she can cast off; it's part of her. Its rituals are not rituals to her; not objects, but instincts. She lives inside them and can't hold them up to look at. That is the beauty of the secular world – she can examine it.

Discussion Questions

1) Do you consider Elizabeth a hero? Why or why not?

2) Why did the author point out that Rav Kirshner is a rationalist in his approach to Jewish observance?

3) How did Elizabeth's dreams play out in starting her own business?

4) What are some of the post-Holocaust influences in Kaaterskill Falls?

5) Why do you think Goodman set her novel in 1976?

6) Why doesn't Elizabeth break away from the Kirshners?

7) Is Elizabeth truly independent?

8) What does English literature represent to Elizabeth?

9) What inspires Elizabeth?

10) Elizabeth is an observant Jew. Do you consider her a religious Jew?

The Jewish Reader is a publication of the National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA.
Editor: Nancy Sherman
www.jewishreader.org