Paradise, New York: A Novel

By Eileen Pollack

We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York, n 1970, when she is a nine year old girl enjoying her family's Catskills hotel, the Garden of Eden. Ten years later, having found nothing else at which she can distinguish herself, she  tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt, running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture.

In the course of that season, Lucy comes to realize her love for the hotel's black handyman, Mr. Jefferson -- and  the difficulties she faces in overcoming the barriers between them. She battles her grandmother's not-so-subtle attempts to sabotage her success, her parents' superstitious fear of anything that attracts attention to the Jews, and her brother's contention that what Lucy is doing is more a matter of ego than authentic religious feeling.

On top of all this, Lucy must contend with the Hasid who buys the chicken farm next door, a cell of ancient Jewish Communist who foment a strike among Eden's overworked young staff, and a gay chef and a gay baker who want to prove to the world that kosher cuisine can satisfy the most sophisticated gourmet.

Among the novel's characters are Shirley and Nat Feidel, who barely survived the Holocaust but refuse to allow bitterness to rule their lives; Mami Goshgarian, the Eden's tumeler; and Jimmy Kilcoin, and Irish Catholic insurance adjustor who has earned a reputation as "the Don Juan of the Catskills" and is determined to seduce Lucy before summer's end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2010
• ISBN: 9781439904039

Eileen Pollack

Eileen Pollack grew up in Liberty, N.Y., the heart of the Jewish Catskills. One of the first two women to graduate from Yale with a BS in physics, she earned an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of five critically acclaimed novels and two award-winning collections of short fiction. Pollack’s work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine and went viral. “The Bris” appeared in the Best American Short Stories 2007; “Pigeons” was selected for Best American Essays 2013 and “Righteous Gentile” for Best American Travel Writing 2018. A former director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, she now lives and writes in Boston.

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Reviews for Paradise, New York

[thatotter-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Eileen Pollack is a talented writer, but I didn't like this book very much. The premise is interesting, but I didn't find the plot very engaging, and the relationship between Lucy and Mr. Jefferson made me cringe.

[froxgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Can (or should) the Borsch Belt rise again? Lucy Applebaum, scion of Catskill hotel owners, tries to resurrect her family's old and tired Eden. As she feels completely incapable of doing anything else, she defies her parents and her evil grandmother, who goes on a hunger strike when Lucy and Thomas Jefferson, the resort's skilled handyman, form a strong bond, despite the differences in their ages, races, and scholarly capabilities.The characters are, for the most part, fairly unlikeable. The guests are Jewish caricatures, the waiters are Third World ciphers, and the plot is pokey. But it does explore an unusual subject, misbegotten nostalgia.