Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969

3. The New, New Pluralism: Religion, Community, and Secularity in Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls

3 The New, New Pluralism Religion, Community, and Secularity in Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls A Ship in a Bottle During a moment of crisis in Allegra Goodman’s novel Kaaterskill Falls, Elizabeth Shulman, a Hasidic Jew who has pushed against the boundaries of the kehilla, or religious covenant, a little too daringly, muses on the gathering shame and curiosity developing around her: “What a contortionist she must seem to her Kaaterskill neighbors, making a business in Hamilton ’s back room. What a marvelous object she is to them. A ship in a bottle . How did she get in there? How could she get out?” (237).1 Elizabeth’s metaphor instantly captures two aspects of her quandary, for she is at once subject to scrutiny and trapped. At issue is her decision to open a kosher market in the back room of an existing town store, Hamilton’s, in Kaaterskill Falls. The town is decidedly non-Jewish throughout the year, though it reluctantly gives way to Jewish vacationers fleeing the summer heat of urban New York. Elizabeth’s desire to open a kosher market is pragmatic, if a bit singular, and at first she receives guarded permission from her clan’s The New, New Pluralism 81 rabbi. However, her choice to sell food that is certified kosher from a different clan’s rabbi causes a scandal, and her permission is revoked. Suddenly , she goes from being a subject in her own right, a member of the community in good standing, to an object of curiosity and rebuke. An insider , she is transformed not so much into an outsider as a person not fully accepted by the community, the very definition of the word inappropriate . As with a ship in a bottle, her community first marvels at her achievement , then pauses to consider the trickery and deception at work in her placement. It is telling that at the peak of her shame, Elizabeth does not cry out to god, does not fall to her knees in prayer, does not even run for shelter in the space of her traditional domestic duties (though she does, eventually) but instead produces a metaphor with which to contemplate her changed state of relations with her community. In fact, it is precisely her literary and artistic bent that consistently sets Elizabeth off from her community, and Kaaterskill Falls uses art, literature, and theater to cleave the alluringly profane world from Elizabeth’s world of sacred duty. The sons of the clan’s head rabbi, Rav Kirshner, are as different as Esau and Jacob, with Jeremy being a literature professor who shares his father’s wide-ranging intellect but not his dedicated spiritual heart, in contrast to Isaiah, the drudgey, religious good son who eventually inherits the position of head rabbi when his father dies. For her part, Elizabeth never doubts in god nor wavers in her faith—in contrast to Jeremy—but her interest in Shakespeare, Victorian novels, and Romantic art necessarily lead her to contemplate a secular world with sufficient clarity and closeness as to pique her desire for greater encounter with the secular. Never doubting her own religiosity, she nonetheless doubts the prevailing opinion that the sacred has nothing to learn from the secular. What saves Elizabeth all along is her presumption that there is in fact a distinction between the sacred and the secular, that she knows just where the dividing line lies and what each must mean. Though she may peek over the “wall” of the Kehilla, she is determined never to scale it. The metaphor of the ship in the bottle also humorously captures the spatial dynamics of Elizabeth’s transgression—a “ship in a bottle,” “a shop in a shop”—though putting it in these terms reveals more about insideroutsider boundaries than she may presume. The metaphor suggests how boundaries operate like a Möbius strip, where something outside is folded 82 Chapter 3 into the inside and the inside line soon becomes the outside. Thus Elizabeth ’s kosher shop is in the back room of Hamilton’s secular sundries store. Though literally an insider, the location of her store marks her quite clearly as an outsider. Ironically, when Elizabeth’s customer traffic massively outpaces Hamilton’s, he is temporarily the outsider, as bewigged and befrocked Jewesses march past his counter, ignoring him on their way to Elizabeth’s. It’s a neat trick indeed, but with consequences...