Get Your Hands On Kaaterskill Falls Brought To You By Allegra Goodman Accessible Via Brochure

this even more the second time around, This story about a small Jewish Orthodox community is remarkable, It is closely observed and breaks my heart with its many details about the human condition,

Recommended. The first time I read this book, Goodreads did not exist, It's fitting, in a way, for me to be thinking back and wondering what my impressions would have been at the time, since so much of this book is about how to assess the past AND live for the future, and whether and how it's possible to do both.


The story is deceptively simple: a set of families who spend their summers over the course of three years in the's in the town of the title.
Throughout theth century, many New Yorkers went to the country in the summer, and many of them followed the pattern set in the first chapters: men working in the city all week and rejoining their wives and children on the weekend.


Some of the conflicts in the book are apparently universal, too, A woman seeks something to call her own beyond the confines of being a wife and mother, A father loves and resents his brilliant, independent older son while relying on his steady, devoted, but mediocre younger son.
An older man finds he has lost interest in the younger woman he married a teenager has a crush on another teenager who hardly knows he's there, while she obsesses about a girlfriend and panics about disappointing her parents a real estate developer tries to win money and respect from the community and finds that one comes at the cost of the other.


And yet this book is Jewish to its core, both in the rituals and rhythms of weekday and Shabbat and the way each conflict is played out.
Those men coming up from the city They are racing against the clock to make it to Kaaterskills Falls before the sun sets Friday evening.
That wife and mother With five young children, she starts a store purveying the items the men would otherwise have to schlep up from kosher markets and bakeries in NYConly to fall afoul of the new rabbi's ideas about his own authority.
That rabbi is the younger son, who becomes his father's heir, while his older brother inherits his father's intellect and his interest in worldly intellectual matters but not his father's blessing.


The Holocaust inflects every story line, The father, Rav Kirshner, was a Holocaust survivor who with an iron will trained his followers to keep their concerns within Orthodox Jewish religious life to the point that their children hardly know Israel existsit's much too secular!, and yet he is aware that none of them now understand the world he grew up in, a world where Jews can read Schiller's translation of Shakespeare in German.
The older man, Andras, is a survivor too, and he has no belief in God, but he observes the Sabbath, keeps kosher, etc.
, to be part of the community and to support his Argentinian wife's burning religious devotion,

How can you be true to the Jewish

past and be a part of the American present How can you live a life that's entirely bounded by a community and have dreams of your own The nonJewish hermit woman in the woods only shows the contrast in deeper hues.


I make it sound as if this is a book of ideas, because I'm a man of ideas and that's how I have to read it.
At a completely different level, it's a set of interlocking stories about the people who live or spend the summer in Kaaterskills Falls, their secrets, hopes, and dreams.
Now that I've finished the book for the second time, I will miss those people, I look for National Book Award winners/finalists and Kaaterskill Falls did not disappoint me, What a wonderful look at a closed Orthodox community with all the welldeveloped characters who migrate from NYC to the Catskill Mtns.
for the summer. I especially enjoyed the friendship of Jewish teenager Renee and her Syrian, freespirited friend, Stephanie I could not say the same for Renee's mother who did not believe in assimilation.
Yet another example of the young showing us how to get along with each other, Not a fast read but a really enjoyable one,
hours,min ago delete,

The Rav, spiritual leader of the community, makes rulings on legal questions, dictates the standards of the community, but he is no counselor or magician to his people.
It is not for him to greet them all, accepting petitions like a king on a throne, It is not for him to pull happiness out of a hat, exorcise evil, or divine misfortune in the misshapen letter of a mezuzah.
He hates that kind of superstition, and has even written that 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, He has written this, and yet he hates both skepticism and ignorant superstition, p

Selected members of the community are portrayed, their hopes and fears analyzed, their doubts questioned.
They all know each other, but each harbors doubts and questions, The depth to the characters carries the story, They face everyday dilemmas, no riveting or unusual events, The women are stronger than the men, This was brilliant. Understated, moving, funny, warm, touching, eyeopening, Ms. Goodman so carefully introduces her characters, slowly reveals them to us, brings them to life in subtly beautiful ways.
This community, whether in Washington Heights or Kaaterskill Falls, is vivid on the page, It was a joy to follow them over two years of their lives, seeing their struggles and joys, seeing the world through their eyes.
I found this book to be both simple and complex, and she masterfully moves from one household to the next, naturally revealing more of everyone's part of the story in a deliberate but never boring way.
I went from feeling great empathy for one character, thinking that actually they really were an awful person, and seeing them redeem themselves in my eyes at the last moment.
And my heart broke for one character but seeing her find a way to heal her wounds was uplifting and inspirational.
I fell in love with these people, have imagined what their lives were like after the book ended, and thoroughly enjoyed learning about a culture I had very little knowledge of before.
A truly incredible book so glad I chose to read it, “ If I dont work with large animals, I want to expose social injustice”,
“Old voices that creaked and swung in rhythm, their long phrases like the screen door on the bungalow, closing slowly, partway, a little more, and then, with a long sigh, thumping shut”.

"But in his daily studies he still strives to understand, identify, take a text to heart, to reach through the centuries of commentary, those layers of response, and grasp a meaning that is strong, believable.
And when it happens, and the words unfold for him and touch his life, this is a moment of great joy.
The burden of decision falls away, and he is free, for he knows what he should do",
"He has lived in this particular hierarchy all his life, moved within it as through water, slowly, but without a feeling of constraint".

"It's as if she'd been spinning and then suddenly she stopped, and the world stopped spinning with her the trees settled back into their places, the scattered house came back together, and the tilted windows slowed and squared themselves".

"How trivial their life is, How insignificant. It is all put on, Tomorrow the week will begin, He will go down to the city and mind his business, He will work the days away, and the days will be light and inconsequential, They will slip through his fingers, They will mean as little to him as a handful of loose change", Sadly perhaps, I'm identifying with Andras's view these days,
"To believe in God morning, noon, and night, To believe in Godand not only to believe in him, but to believe he listens to prayers, What would it be like to have that reassurance That God would take an interest, and approve or disapprove one's life.
How comforting to believe that one's life is significant in that way, That it is guided by God's will, and not left to chance",
"What a marvelous object she is to them, A ship in a bottle, How did she get in there How could she get out",
"She smoothes the back of her skirt where it always creases from the stool", What a detail!
"'How are you Nina told us there's been a rabbinical eyebrow raised at you'".

" she sees the letters in the book in front of her, and her lips move, but she is muffled by her own thoughts".
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