Tradition and desire in Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls

Slowly and firmly with the passing years, the Rav has guided his community into a life of increasing restrictions. He has moved in his exegesis of Jewish law toward an interpretation ever more bounded and punctilious.... Irrevocably, the Rav is drawing his people after him, in study, in word and deed, into a realm of obscurantism, a life encumbered and weighed down by tradition and endless layers of legalism and strict observance.--Allegra Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls 31)

In her first novel, Kaaterskill Falls (1998), Allegra Goodman explores the ways that bitter ideological divisions indeed permeate communities of faith that struggle to preserve themselves while responding to the daunting pressure of secular knowledge. Though Goodman first proved herself in the short story collections The Family Markowitz (1996) and Total Immersion (1998) as a deft satirist of religious manners and secularism, her first novel brought a more weighty and perceptive consideration to bear on the crisis of Jewish faith--rather than the bifurcated foibles of "ethnicity"-in modernity. Without addressing the trauma of the Holocaust head-on, her novel investigates its lasting legacy through characters whose assimilation or faith seems to pivot on the imperative to somehow wrest meaning from its psychological, historical, and spiritual consequences. (1) But more importantly, her novel may be read as an eloquent refutation of the grave thesis argued by Bernard Susser and Charles S. Liebman, two acclaimed sociologists of religion, who recently concluded that, in the absence of "the brute fact of persecution," Jewish life will lose its "tenacious and pervasive mental fixture," in other words, its communal coherence (25). In her textured examination of both the Orthodox individual and the collective, Goodman's novel offers a cogent challenge to their notion that "no really adequate alternative to the view of Jewish existence as precarious, disempowered, and embattled has evolved" (27) as a living paradigm and guarantor of Jewish civilization. At the heart of the novel is a quiet reexamination of the talmudic ethos that Torah is pluralistic, lending itself to be seen from a myriad of perspectives and in turn supporting those perspectives.

Garnering plaudits from Ruth Wisse and other members of the Jewish American literary establishment, the novel, a National Book Award finalist, was noted for its important contribution to the minuscule corpus of works that have ventured into a close examination of American Orthodoxy. Wisse celebrated the "spiritual largeness" of Goodman's novel by noting how powerfully it explores the contours of an atypical moment in recent history "in which a small group of Jews could finally be casual enough about the wrath of both God and history, yet attentive enough to the social discipline instilled by their religion, to produce a context for the novel of manners" (67). Wisse provocatively likens Goodman's achievement to the social vision of Jane Austen. It is not such a surprising comparison when one considers the moral and social weightiness of Goodman's measured appraisal of the dynastic Orthodoxy of her "Kirshner" Jews, disciples of Rav (Rabbi) Elijah Kirshner, an aging widower afflicted by Parkinson's disease, whose daunting authority stretches from Washington Heights to the subcommunity of Kaaterskill. More importantly, as an introspective examination of the trials of faith in the wake of irrecoverable loss, it stands as a path-breaking novel.

Jewish American novelist Tova Reich, another early reviewer, remarked on the unexpected pleasures of a novel in which Jews, like any other people, seem to manage quite well within the bounds of the quotidian, noting that "Jews at leisure does not exactly leap to mind as a promising literary subject." As Reich caustically observes, when Jews are represented as if "at home" or otherwise at their ease, "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." Like Wisse, Reich saw Goodman's novel about Jews who follow their Rav to the mountains every summer, free of any existential threat, as a logical "testament to the level of security and comfort American Jews have achieved" (18). Goodman, gifted in writing in the present tense, brilliantly collapses "transcendence" (God, nature, spiritual struggle) into the fabric of the everyday. Still, while she writes from a third-generational remove from the Holocaust, her characters' moral trials and response to historical responsibility always place Holocaust memory at the heart of their spiritual universe. At the same time, Goodman's probing portrait of the surprisingly restless consciousness of a rabbinic sage strongly intimates that the several years of Holocaust destruction cannot substitute for millennia of Jewish civilization.

by Ranen Omer-Sherman