LEAH'S JOURNEY

by Gloria Goldreich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1978

Goldreich's commercial aim could have been improved only by sending her first novel directly to her audience by personal messenger: she knows whom she wants to reach, Leah Goldfeder's journey takes her from the pogroms of Odessa (where she loses one husband and remarries another) to the lower East Side, through the sweatshops to a career as a successful fashion designer, around an affair with a heroic union organizer and then rekindled love with her pants-presser-turned-famous-psychiatrist husband. The old hop, skip, and jump, in other words, from Hester St. to Brighton Beach to Scarsdale. The children do obligatory service in Israel, having caught from their industrious father respect for ""assaults on enormous problems, for the kindling of tiny flames against the ever-widening darkness."" And all the Goldfeders share in the reverberations of Big Events: the Triangle Shirt Factory disaster, the McCarthy hearings, concentration camps, Southern segregation this is one of those books you can write the outline for before cracking it open, then tick off the set-pieces as they come. Goldreich's earnest but over-driven prose (""At lunchtime they munched frankfurters, thick with mustard and hairy with sauerkraut"") adds weight but no life. Only one theme, so negligently developed and sketchily thought out that you might miss it, adds any real flavor: the Jewish woman's custom of cutting her hair as a sort of liberation from the past. Beyond this, though, all that's here is pious suburbiana, a stack of bagels without a smidgin of tangy lox.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1978

Categories: FICTION