We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York, in 1970, as 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, Lucy tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt and running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture.
In the course of the season, Lucy battles her grandmother’s attempts to sabotage Lucy’s success, her parents’ superstitious fears 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.
Paradise, New York explores the comforts and complexities of American ethnic identity with a charming commitment to laughter and love.
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Acclaim
“Pollack’s first novel succeeds … in taking on such large themes as racism and bigotry, love and loyalty.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A novel long on wonderful writing, sharp details, and no-nonsense nostalgia.”—Elinor Lipman, The Boston Sunday Globe
“A finely crafted … first novel detailing the journey to wisdom of a young woman who grew up in a Borscht Belt hotel.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Pollack will not disappoint readers with her first novel, Paradise, New York…. It is a stark and precise depiction of the psychological and cultural states of American Jewry, a narrative challenge that Pollack meets with legend, parable, sociology, history and old-fashioned storytelling.”—Judith Bolton-Fasman, Washington Post Book World
“Paradise, New York is set in the Catskills, the area once known for false hilarity and exaggerated emotions. But there’s nothing false in this story, just believable and sympathetic people together during a summer that they will not forget. Neither will readers of this lovely novel.”—Max Apple, author of Roommates and I Love Gootie
“This first novel of ‘the last Catskills resort’ nearly bursts off the page. Eileen Pollack’s characters crack wise, work hard, make loving trouble for one another, and then, as soon as they’ve got us laughing, they move on and break hearts. Eileen Pollack is a marvelous writer; and Paradise, New York is a sharply observed and poignant novel about the dangers of nostalgia and the willfulness of time.”—Marcie Hershman, author of Safe in America
“In this funny and moving novel … Paradise involves both the preservation of an ethnic identity and the transcendence of all ethnic identities through tolerance and love. Eileen Pollack has written an absorbing and beautifully fascinating parable about faith, and the forces of love and ambition that can bring it down.”—Charles Baxter, author of Believers
Temple University Press, hardback 1998, paperback 2000
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