Religious Jews at Leisure

...The men in this group, unlike Hasidim, are clean shaven...

...A hundred and two hundred more, until they lie there like a pile of junk, and he is not angry anymore...

...even the most mundane details of life are subject to his authority...

...When the store is summarily closed down by the Rav's younger son after she caters a small party with food that is kosher, but not Kirshner-approved kosher, Elizabeth enters a period of inner despondency and religious questioning...

...He understands now "That it is good to rest in gardens and to sit in lawn chairs, the Sabbath lasting late as the long summer day...

...The women wear long sleeves, long skirts, stockings, and, once married, cover their hair with a scarf or wig...

...These consist primarily of social gatherings that are generally held on weekends, when the men come up from the city to join their families for the Sabbath, religious observances and various outings...

...She emerges by the novel's end with some measure of independence, yet finds it within the framework of continued acceptance...

...The dust flies up around him, as he throws the tomes onto the carpet...

...How can the reader complain...

...Elizabeth Shulman, for example, the novel's model wife and mother, struggles to reconcile her commitment to religious life with her attraction to the outside world...

...Accompanied by his adherents, he came to America from Frankfurt in 1938 before Kristallnacht...

...To Jeremy he bequeaths only the bulk of his vast library—volumes of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schiller's translation of Shakespeare, Aristotle in German, and much more...

...Rather, it is located where the true passion lies here— in the spiritual and intellectual life...

...families feud...

...In the course of the two years the novel spans,from 1976to 1978, babies are born, people get sick and die...

...As a result, the "transcendent moment"—the moment of acute love of children, of God, of nature, of personal and spiritual discovery and awakening—is leveled and absorbed into the fabric of the "workaday world...

...He overturns the boxes at his feet and dumps the old books on the floor...

...One startling but brief expression of robust passion does nevertheless stand out in the unfolding of Kaaterskill Falls...

...Andras is a controlled, remote Commentary reader, who, during the War at age 16, was sent by his parents from Budapest to join his two sisters in America...

...Jews at leisure does not exactly leap to mind as a promising literary subject...

...For his wife, Elizabeth, the woods conjure up a fairyland, "secret forests where you can become someone else...

...Suddenly, he has had enough...

...They wear black suits and fedoras and go out into the larger world to work and study, though their lives are defined, above all, by strict observance and immersion in the sacred texts...

...He feels himself to be almost contemptuously detached from his beautiful Argentine wife, a woman much younger than he whose child-rearing, social and religious ideas and pronouncements seem to him banal and naïve, and who can never share his memories...

...Another character, Andras Melish, perhaps the most interesting in the book, also undergoes a quiet struggle and has a small epiphany...

...Kaaterskill Falls is where Goodman's people come to refresh and renew themselves in a natural setting...

...The daily domestic routines of supervising children, managing households and baking are dwelt upon, too—indeed, there is a real preoccupation here with baking and baked goods...

...Their leader and spiritual guide, Rav Elijah Kirshner, is a scholar of distinguished rabbinic lineage...

...Maybe we should just relax and enjoy it...

...it makes her feel "exuberant, unstoppable, on the wind of her imagination...

...When it is done, as in Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 or Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, it is usually with catastrophe looming in the background...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara," "Master of the Return," and most recently "The Jewish War" What Allegra Goodman demonstrates in Kaaterskill Falls is that it is possible to write, in the present tense, a pleasant novel about religious American Jews actually relaxing on vacation, actually noticing and appreciating nature and the scenery around them...

...In their everyday pursuits and preoccupations Jews here, even religious Jews, seem almost normal...

...There it is caught and there it remains...

...Practically everyone associated with Kaaterskill Falls, the author not least among them, is ref med, high-minded and balanced...

...She has a moment of illumination: "I want—she thinks, and then it comes to her simply, with all the force of her pragmatic soul—I want to open a store...

...The cartons of books invade Jeremy's small Queens apartment, besieging him...

...That it is good to serve and to eat, to sit and to receive the work of the baker's hand...

...Maybe that's a good sign...

...Others do have their crises, but they work through them quietly, with very little outward sign of turmoil or suffering...

...This is the one time that a major Goodman character acts out, and it's a relief...

...He demands rigid observance of the law as he interprets it...

...The Jews who gather there represent a range of observance, but central to the novel are the members of the Kirshner community of Washington Heights, who follow their "Rav" to the mountains each summer...

...Jeremy is estranged from his family because of his engagement with the secular world...

...No unseemly word of rebuke is spoken, but relations between father and son collapse...

...White pages fall open, exposed...

...This new-found intimacy is abruptly ended when Jeremy openly desecrates the Sabbath by arriving at his father's home after candle lighting, an offense that, to outsiders, might appear trivial, but that those familiar with Orthodox Jewish life will recognize as monumental...

...He dumps the books until his arms hurt...

...In the end, though, large life events— the discovery in the woods of the body of Una, an old forest eccentric he had come to know, and the impending death from cancer of his beloved sister, Eva—soften him, and lead him to a new acceptance of his wife and a new appreciation of small things...

...This, oddly enough, might be at least partially the consequence of Goodman's using the present tense, a form she has favored from the beginning of her career and at which she is adept...

...others undergo a variety of spiritual, psychological, marital, and financial crises...

...children stray and threaten to rebel...

...It does, however, have a price, specifically the projection of a kind of flatness, a sense that everything exists in miniature, is restrained and muted...

...The rushing water evokes for one character, Isaac Shulman, the sound of "a thousand men praying together, davening and turning pages...

...It is, perhaps, a testament to the level of security and comfort American Jews have achieved that Allegra Goodman seems so perfectly at ease depositing her characters principally in an upstate New York town during the summer and chronicling their activities there...

...It centers not, as one might expect, in what goes on between men and women —a subject that is only very diffidently touched on in these pages, although report has it that even in the religious world such passion can be ignited...

...He dumps them all on the floor, the theology and the German poetry, the old history books...

...It involves the older, more brilliant of Rav Kirshner's two sons, Jeremy, a professor at Queens College who is "a specialist in Castiglione and in Renaissance courtly handbooks...

...In episodes of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story, human casualties are recovering from unspeakable trauma...

...The little grocery she opens in Kaaterskill might strike the reader as too modest to satisfy great longings, but for Elizabeth it suffices...

...Bindings crackle...

...And yet, somehow it seems as if nothing much really happens...

...The Rav, in his dying days, seeks to draw his son closer, summoning him to Kaaterskill for long conversations on intellectual topics...

...When the old man dies soon after, he leaves everything—all of his property and, most important, the succession—to his more diligent and plodding younger son, Isaiah...