2019 A to Z Challenge - "K"
While I appreciate the writing of Ms. Goodman - as one reviewer described this novel: relaxing. I felt I was missing so much because the Jewish terminology, practices and history were not fleshed out and frankly, I didn't feel like putting that much work into researching it myself apart from the novel; so I feel other readers who are more familiar will get so much more out of this book than I did. For example: in one paragraph were the terms "shul", "daven", "mechitzah", "bima", "drash". Through context I was able to discern some of them, but not enough to form a complete picture in my mind.
Aside from that the novel reads well, slow but not drawn out and deals with the complexity of living a religious life and to what extent.
As an aside, I would love to visit the real location of Kaaterskill Falls in NY!
Summary from Goodreads: The stories of three Orthodox Jewish families, each of whom is tugged between religious tradition and the secular world. The story takes place in the upstate New York town of Kaaterskill, summer Mecca for the tightly knit Kirshner sect. Model wife and mother Elizabeth Shulman pictures her community as a sort of Mont-Saint-Michel, an island both joined and separated from the outside world as if by rising and falling tides. Fascinated with what lies on the spiritual mainland, she hides behind the reassuring rhythms of religious observance, though she's inspired with a "desire, as intense as prayer," to create something all her own.
Despite her pious husband's doubts, she does, in the form of a store catering to Kaaterskill's "summer people"--a community Goodman brings memorably to life. The Shulmans' neighbor Andras Melish, a Hungarian who fled World War II and a vanished world of assimilated European Jewry, struggles to understand his young Argentinian wife Nina, whose need for tradition grows with each passing year. The ailing Rav Kirshner must decide which son will carry on in his shoes: dutiful but plodding Isaiah or his brilliant but secular brother Jeremy. Andras and Nina's daughter befriends an Arab girl, while Elizabeth and Isaac's daughter dreams in secret of Israel. Meanwhile, the town's year-round residents observe the Orthodox newcomers with bewilderment and occasional dismay.
Quotes: "He hates that kind of superstition...he prefers doubt and skepticism to that kind of belief. For the skeptic's questions may provide a ground for learning, but the ignorant believer cannot reason."
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