Kaaterskill Falls
Authors: Allegra Goodman
PRAISE FOR
Kaaterskill Falls
“Kaaterskill Falls
continues where [Goodman’s] last book,
The Family Markowitz
, left off—and then goes further, cutting new ground…. Her truest talent is for imposing a shape on the little, everyday disturbances that distract most of her writing peers; she has an almost 19th-century ability to create a sense of linkage, of one existence impinging on the next.”
—Daphne Merkin,
The New York Times Book Review
“Admirably rich in nuance and detail,
Kaaterskill Falls
sets out to compose an entire tapestry, and certainly in its gradually realized world of interrelated friends and neighbors, it succeeds.”
—The Boston Globe
“Like Jane Austen, Goodman locates the universal in the quiet doings of small, honeycomb societies, deftly tailoring the particulars of her characters to generic moments of self-awareness.”
—Elle
“[Goodman] writes with such winning grace, such deftly evocative intimacy of detail.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
“A delight, stem to stern … Goodman has often been singled out for her eye, which like Arnold Bennett’s or Vermeer’s never loses a significant detail or blurs its focus…. This young Mozart of Jewish fiction has pulled off another major feat.”
—
Newsday
“A carefully observed and haunting novel … Like the late Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, Goodman wrings ineffable strands of passion from the quietest of hopes and disappointments.”
—
People
“[An] inventive first novel … Goodman’s writing is nuanced, graced with subtle imagery and flashes of insight.”
—
USA Today
“A writer of uncommon clarity and grace … Goodman’s handling of incident is masterly.”
Please turn the page for more extraordinary acclaim.
—
The New Yorker
“To call this a Jewish novel, or even a religious novel, would be to simplify it unfairly.
Kaaterskill Falls
reads like a realist novel from a century or more ago. Goodman’s clear writing recalls Fielding, Austen, Balzac, Tolstoy. The book also recalls the tradition of landscape in American writing: Emerson’s sublime nature, Thoreau’s woods, Emily Dickinson’s slant of light.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“In
Kaaterskill Falls
[Goodman] creates a world that envelops the reader…. A talented writer who crafts beautiful sentences: Goodman makes us think and laugh.”
—
The Jewish Week
“An old-fashioned, quiet, complicated story … the kind of story that matters. The kind you have to read for yourself.”
—The Miami Herald
“After two acclaimed short-story collections, Allegra Goodman has written a novel,
Kaaterskill Falls
, and it’s been worth the wait.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“A remarkable achievement … With insight, affection and gentle humor, Goodman builds her narrative with scenes of marital relationships, domestic routines, generational conflict, new love and old scandals…. 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 minutae 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.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Allegra Goodman transports us to a sealed, antique world in the heart of modern New York…. Thanks to her flowing, lyrical style and deft characterization,
Kaaterskill Falls
is a compelling human—and theological—drama.”
—
Daily News
(New York)
“Ms. Goodman does a marvelously sympathetic job of conjuring up the circumscribed world of the rabbi’s followers…. [She] writes with such supple understanding of her people that the reader quickly … become[s] absorbed in the small, daily dramas of their lives. So authoritative is her storytelling that she is able to move from one character’s point of view to another’s and back again to an omniscient overview without missing a beat.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
“Kaaterskill Falls
is a kind of heaven … complex and brilliant…. Allegra Goodman has not so much created a world as given us entry into one that, for many, will seem almost unimaginably foreign. But Goodman’s talent runs so deep that to step into it is to live there for a while.”
—Mary Cantwell,
Vogue
“Goodman’s portrait of the Rav is a marvel of research and imagination, a fascinating multifaceted profile of power and rigidity based on utter devotion to Jewish law and prayer….
Kaaterskill Falls
is a different, surprising kind of Jewish novel … one that isn’t afraid to both question and embrace
Yiddishkeit
and spirituality.”
—
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Goodman] creates a world that gives the natural wonder of Kaaterskill Falls its full due. In short, occasions to admire the shape and ring of her sentences abound…. Few putatively ‘Jewish novels’ manage the tricky business of giving equal weight to substance and style.
Kaaterskill Falls
does—and does so brilliantly.”
—
The Washington Post Book World
“An elegant portrait of orthodox Jewish life in the modern world.”
—
The Forward
“A stunning story … As warm and knowing as her acclaimed story collection,
The Family Markowitz
.”
—
Glamour
TOTAL IMMERSION
THE FAMILY MARKOWITZ
PARADISE PARK
In memory of
Madeleine Joyce Goodman
mother, scientist, administrator
and baker extraordinaire
We, I may say, fortunately, missed the direct path, and after wandering a little, found it out by the noise—for, mark you, it is buried in trees…. First, we stood a little below the head about half way down the first fall, buried deep in trees, and saw it streaming down two more descents to the depth of near fifty feet—then we went on a jut of rock nearly level with the second fall-head, where the first fall was above us, and the third below our feet still—at the same time we saw that the water was divided by a sort of cataract island on whose other side burst out a glorious stream—then the thunder and the freshness.
—J
OHN
K
EATS
Letter to Tom Keats, 1818
F
RIDAY
afternoon, Edelman’s Bakery in Washington Heights is like the stock exchange—paper numbers strewn across the floor, everybody shouting orders: “Give me two! Seedless! No, make that four.”
“A dozen onion!”
“What?”
“A dozen onion rolls—and I’m in a rush.”
“Six challahs!” Isaac calls out. Suit jacket slung over his shoulder, he leans against the glass counter where Mrs. Edelman presides at the cash register. Isaac’s white shirt is drenched with sweat, his tie folded in the pocket. The air conditioner is feeble, and the bakery is mobbed with sweating customers: the women, in their long skirts and long sleeves, all covered up, even in the heat. The men, just off from work, their faces flushed under their black hats. The bakery floor, and even the walls, are scuffed and dirty, the glass cases empty except for a few babkas on curled wax paper. Edelman’s is rich only in the fragrance of its bread.
Plucked from wire bins, Isaac’s challahs are so fresh that Mrs. Edelman’s fingers dent them. The loaves are magnificent, over a foot long, artfully braided, glossy with painted egg white, but time is short. Mrs. Edelman dumps them unceremoniously into brown paper bags. Isaac snatches them up with his change and runs out to his station wagon.
He drops the bread and his suit jacket into the scorching-hot
backseat and starts the car. He does not take off his hat; Isaac wears a black felt fedora, even in the summer. He is a small man, slightly built. His eyes are not dark, but light brown, and luminous like amber. His hair is brown, too, and like all the men in Washington Heights’ Kirshner community, he is clean shaven, almost modern looking, with neither beard nor peyyes. Isaac rolls up his shirtsleeves, and the veins stand out on his bare forearms. The steering wheel burns his fingers, but he has a wiry strength, a commuter’s stamina.
Easing out into the traffic, Isaac passes shop windows armored with metal grilles, cement walls spray-painted pink. He drives past Auerbach’s butcher shop, Schwartz’s kosher cheese, Grimaldi’s corner store, and the Kirshner synagogue with its barred windows and combination locks. In 1976 the neighborhood is small and shabby and tight. The Kirshners’ apartment buildings are built close together of red brick, their few stores clustered as if for safety. Flights of stairs, hundreds of cement steps, provide shortcuts from the streets above to those below, and always, on the cement stairs, mothers and their babies, grandparents and teenagers, are passing each other. Everyone takes these stairs to get up and down, as if the neighborhood were a single house. There are no stairs, however, to the top of the Heights. No Kirshners climb up to Fort Tryon Park or go to the museum there, the Cloisters, with its icons and crucifixes, its medieval sculpture carved in cool gray stone. The Kirshners never think of the Cloisters. They are absorbed in their own religion. Although they have no paintings, or stained glass, or sculpture, they array themselves with gorgeous words.
P
ULLING
into the upper Port Authority, Isaac sits with the engine running and scans the crowds for his car pooler, Andras Melish. Loudspeakers in the bus terminal blare destinations in New York State: Syracuse, Albany, Schenectady. Isaac is surprised not to see Andras standing there, waiting. He does not think he could be overlooking him. Andras is not easily overlooked. He always stands out, much taller than the others in the waiting crowd.