Description
Description
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...
About the Author
About the Author
Allegra Goodman's novels include The Chalk Artist, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She has written two collections of short stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion and a novel for younger readers, The Other Side of the Island. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Jewish Review of Books, and The American Scholar. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is writing a new novel.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
Praise for Allegra Goodman: "The brushstrokes seemingly casual yet sure, always the exact--and unlikely--equivalent of a shadow or reflected gleam."--Anna Shapiro, New York Newsday "An astonishing display of virtuosity."--Los Angeles Times on Total Immersion "Exceptionally well written: funny, wise, keenly observed....One of the most maddening and recognizable families to come along in years...an enchanting book."--Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times on The Family Markowitz
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Dell Publishing Company
Pub date:
1999-08-10
Length:
336 pages
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