Executive Times
		2007 Book Reviews
		Golden Country by Jennifer Gilmore
Rating:			***
		(Recommended)
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	Promises Jennifer Gilmore’s debut novel, Golden Country, contains well developed characters with amazing stories of their experience as immigrants in America over four decades of promise in the 20^th century. Readers want to know more about the characters and their situations, and Gilmore obliges as she unravels their hopes and dreams, their successes and failures. Gilmore helps readers feel the striving and the ambitions of these characters. Here’s an excerpt, from the middle of Chapter 4, “Frances Verdonik, 1925,” pp. 57-50: Frances always reasoned that it was the way the neighborhood and his family turned on Solomon Brodsky that had made him run away with her sister. Why else? Solomon had the money, the high, flashy life, and a gang that protected him from the kike-hating world. But even young Frances knew he had lost the love of his father. After Pauline left, Frances sat on the stoop each night, watching the men walk across the Williamsburg Bridge, returning to their American shtetls. She watched Herbert Brodsky, a man who had once stood on the top step three doors down watching his boys play marbles. He had screamed at them about America’s promise. Goldene medina, my boys, he’d told them night after night. “For you,” he’d tell Joseph and Solomon, leaning down, his arm hooked to each boy’s rigid shoulder, “I promise you a golden country.” All the men seemed to walk burdened by that horrible weight of promises made to their children. Watching Herbert, who seemed even more stooped than before, Frances imagined that somehow it was the children who were meant to lift the heaviness. Though she never heard him say so, it was obvious that Mr. Brodsky knew exactly what his elder son did for a living. Mr. Brodsky used to ruffle Solomon’s hair and call him his “little kaddishel.” Of course it would be him, the older boy, who would say Kaddish for his father when he died. When Sol made himself into the Terrier, though, and began to wear his hair slicked back and high with pomade, smoke cigars, and run around with all kinds of reckless women, Mr. Brodsky started calling Joseph “kaddishel.” Well, who the heck wants to be on the wrong side of God? Frances wondered. She imagined that when the old ladies averted their watery eyes, when the young mothers swung their children to the opposite hip from where Solomon stood, when his father turned instead to Joseph, Solomon must have gotten scared. Didn’t he know that God sees everything? The Verdonik and Brodsky families had known each other in Russia. In the same village, Selma and Rose had kneaded the challah; their fathers had prayed together, their knees bending as they davened toward the light. And when the Verdoniks fled, when Frances was just three years old, the Brodskys were not long to follow. In Pauline, perhaps, Solomon could be redeemed. A nice Jewish girl from the neighborhood~ before the eyes of God, before the eyes of his all-knowing father. The night Pauline snuck away with the Terrier, Frances woke up from a terrible dream. In it, she and her sister were alone at Ellis Island, holding hands as the man with his mean mustache stamped their arrival, just as he had thirteen years before, only now they were older girls. In her dream, their parents weren’t with them, and the man stamped their papers and told them they would have a new name: “Green,” he told them, his meaty hands, fingers with bitten nails and bloody cuticles, gripping the bloodred stamp. “Like money,” he said, laughing. And then, suddenly, Pauline was gone, flying into the throng of people, all waiting to cross over into Manhattan. Franny looked behind her in her dream, and she found that all the Russians in queues to the water had turned to skeletons. Their skin was melting from their tiny Russian bones when Frances woke up, calling for her sister. But Pauline was gone. Frances got up and took out a piece of writing paper and a pencil and began to write: Dear Pauline: How could you leave me here alone? But she stopped herself. Where on earth would she send a letter to her sister now? News of Pauline’s exodus with a mobster and Abraham’s condition traveled quickly through the neighborhood. All were startled. Abraham Verdonik had worked hard; he had become a respected man in the community. Besides, the insurance. He held the slips of paper with their lives scratched on them, how much each member of the community was worth to his or her family, sick or dead. All the insurance that man sold, and he hadn’t taken a policy out on himself! There were so many things that needed paying for, like Pauline’s ribbons, socks fringed with lace, which as she got older turned to stockings, a tortoiseshell compact that she demanded. Though on the surface it was true he favored her older sister, Frances knew that this was merely the shell of his affection, that somewhere in the lovely, breakable egg of her father’s love, the yolk was hers. And Frances’s heart had always belonged to her father. While her mother’s nervousness had overtaken the family with a constant sveepink out zhe dirt, the only phrase she said in English, a ceaseless dusting and mopping and scrubbing as if stopping the housekeeping would somehow keep the blood from pumping to her own thump-thump-thumping heart, Franny’s father was a calm man and one inclined toward speaking. This is how he was able to keep up with the insurance business, how he avoided what so many in their neighborhood could not, factory work. He managed to convince people how much they needed insurance to protect their families. Even the concept of insurance was a foreign one: Why pay for a nonexistent malady only to put a hex on the entire family? Frances would come in before bed in the evenings, when the men in the neighborhood sat at the Verdonik kitchen table fingering the edges of the stained oilcloth as Rose looked on, scowling. Her father explained that they were not paying for nothing but investing in everything: Insurance, see? A blessing not a curse. You mustn’t let your payments lapse, he told them. He was a fool not to have been more careful for his own family. But Abraham’s carelessness was the result of a profound belief that they— the Verdoniks of Williamsburg—were at the exact beginning of things. “Frances”—he would always try to speak to his daughter in English— “in America, no end in sight. Only zhe beginnings here.” Whereas Rose, with her inveterate pessimism~ had given up on learning English—Who cares? I’ll be gone soon, she’d say in Yiddish—Abraham took up the language of his new world with zeal. And he passed this on to Frances. Late at night, when talk of business or politics was through, Abraham would sit at the edge of his younger daughter’s bed and tell her stories. These were the moments he spoke to her in Yiddish, and these stories always held hidden morals: “Once there was a rabbi, the leader of a village that was bordered by a people who hated them. One day their leader invited him over to work out their differences. He served ham! What did the rabbi do?” The moral was always in English: “He ate zhe ham!” Abraham told her. “To save his people he ate zhe ham, you see, my Franny-goil?” Her father’s gravelly voice juxtaposed with the sound of her mother in the kitchen scrubbing the roasting pan with steel wool always brought Frances to a peaceful sleep. Had it been Frances who had fled the neighborhood with a gangster who promised her diamonds and real estate, Abraham’s heart might have fallen through his body on the spot. But it was Pauline who had gone, so he simply took to his bed, and it was Frances, now his only daughter, who sat at her father’s bedside. She tried to coax him upright while Rose fluttered around the room, picking up knickknacks and placing them back down again. “Please, Mama,” Frances would implore, grabbing at her arm. “Come sit with us.” But Rose would not give in. She would snap her arm back as if she feared it would be taken, and, were it loosed from its socket, her entire limb left in the incapable hands of her daughter, who would clean up this mess then? Gilmore also captures the power of the neighborhood community and the importance of identity and fitting in. The promise of the country’s growth and opportunities, the promises to each other, and the weight of the promises of the past are all components of this novel. Golden Country is a finely written debut novel that will entertain many readers. Steve Hopkins, January 25, 2007
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	2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the February 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Golden Country.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com