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Something is happening in 'Kaaterskill Falls,' Goodman's first novel
DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY
Special to the Jewish News
When I was about 12 years old, my father took me to see Debussy's operatic masterpiece, "Pelleas et Melisande." Unlike all previous such cultural forays, which always were greatly successful, this one turned out to be frustrating.
I was struck by the music's beauty, of course, but I kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting for - an aria. One single, solitary aria, by the time the opera neared its end, would have satisfied me, but there weren't any arias.
"Pelleas" is an opera in which, to my immature and impetuous mind, "nothing was happening." I was too young to appreciate the atmospheric beauty of Debussy's expressionistic descriptions of moods, feelings, events and, of course, of happiness and unhappiness.
Reading Allegra Goodman's first full-length novel, "Kaaterskill Falls," (The Dial Press, hard cover, $23.95) evoked some of the same reactions I first had to "Pelleas et Melisande." Good heavens, won't there ever be anything happening?
No, nothing like a scandal, with or without sexual overtones, or a mugging, a kidnapping, a case of fraud, or anything that in the world of opera would have been described by an aria, happens in "Kaaterskill Falls." Yet the book, as one progresses through its 324 pages, becomes more and more absorbing and reads, well, like a novel.
The young (31 year-old) author has two previous books to her credit. Both, "The Family Markowitz" and "Total Immersion," consist of cleverly assembled short stories about the dynamics of family life. In a way, "Kaaterskill Falls" continues the theme, but here we have an array of Jewish families who all are distinctly Orthodox, but with a surprising number of shadings and varieties, and we have the author's masterful description of how they all interact successfully, how they all function in each other's surroundings and, if you want to go a little deeper, how Jewish life itself, to this day and after all that has happened to the Jews in the way of genocide and persecutions, how this life is prevailing and will continue to be the basis of eternal Judaism.
Kaaterskill Falls is a small community in the Catskills, in upstate New York, to which a tightly knit congegration of Jewish families travel every summer to experience a sort of communal life under the traditional leadership of Rav Elijah Kirshner, the Orthodox rabbi who was born in Germany but has lived in America for ages. The "action" is set 20 years ago, while the aging rabbi's leadership is strict and unquestioned.
When British-born Elizabeth Shulman, one of the wives of the Kirshner clan, wants to open a retail food store, she cannot do so until the rav grants her the license. He does, but then the following year, upon the rav's death, when his successor denies her the license's renewal, Elizabeth has to close up shop.
Elizabeth is the most interesting of all the characters in the story. Although submitting to them, she lives in the hope of bursting out of the restrictive confines of religious dogma. She teaches her five (by the end of the book, six) daughters to hope as well, to dream of becoming doctors, lawyers, retailers or whatever they choose. She teaches them that "this is America and that you can do whatever you want."
The rav's sons, Jeremy and Isaiah, are as different from each other as is imaginable, yet they vie for their father's succession with mutual respect and consideration. The older, Jeremy, is so far into the secular world that the succession, by its own weight, goes to Isaiah, who then exerts it with his own, unbending rules based on the Torah. Everything, of course, will be worked out, and even Elizabeth will one day own the store in which she took a job after her own business was forced to close.
Plenty happens in the opera "Pelleas et Melisande," but it is presented in a revolutionary way that doesn't require arias. And plenty is happening in "Kaaterskill Falls." Allegra Goodman has her own, very fluid way of describing a community and its life that, plainly, does not need literary arias. Her sense of lyricism and her keen observations make for prose that sings.
Dimitri Drobatschewsky, retired music critic for the Arizona Republic, is a freelance writer and interpreter living in Glendale, AZ.
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