We are lucky to have as a Berkshire neighbor Roberta Silman, novelist and short story writer; author of children’s books; and reviewer for the Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly, The New York Times, and—most frequently—the online arts magazine The Arts Fuse. With her usual historical perspective and sympathetic insight, she has given us a new novel, and it’s well worth savoring.
“Summer Lightning” (Campden Hills Books 2022) explores the journey of a Jewish family in mid-20th-century America, from the time Itzhak and Beila meet without exchanging names in 1927, until the marriage of their second daughter, Vivie, in 1966. This is familiar territory for Silman, who well knows the Zeitgeist of the period and has an eye and a heart for the ravaged psyches of emigrants forced to leave Europe because of the war and Nazi persecution. In her earlier novel, “Secrets and Shadows,” she limned for us, with terrifying truth and compassionate understanding, the portrait of a man whose traumas in Nazi Poland lay hidden and potent under his successful career and marriage, finally tearing his family apart. Only a trip to Berlin when the Wall comes down can help him to put his past to rest and to awaken understanding and forgiveness from his ex-wife.
In “Summer Lightning,” the brief, anonymous encounter of Itzhak and Beila at the send-off of Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight sets the scene for their future together, enmeshed with historical events and concerns of the age and infused with hope for progress. Itzhak Kaplow is a new immigrant to New York, while Beila is the first American-born child of immigrants. By the time they find each other again, they have Americanized their names to Isaac and Belle and found work in the textile trade. They marry in 1934; move from Brooklyn to Long IslandL and raise two beautiful, talented, and interesting daughters, Sophy and Vivie.
The family is cultivated and bookish, widely read, from Maimonides to Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Proust, and “Catcher in the Rye.” The daughters study piano with an old-school German teacher and are well-versed in classical music. Isaac strives to reconcile Jewish religion and belief with modern scientific thought and technology. Belle struggles to be a good mother. And later, in trying to find herself as the children need her less and the suburbs become claustrophobic, she ventures into the world of avant-garde New York artists and writers. She is inspired by Isabel Bishop and befriended by the artists of the Jane Street Gallery in Greenwich Village, among others, the painter Nell Blaine; the writer Frank O’Hara; and, most importantly, with the mercurial, multi-talented, and dangerous painter and musician, Larry Rivers, who brings them into contact with the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Ornette Coleman along with a world of drugs and sexual freedom. It’s fun to encounter these actual historical figures in world of the novel.
All four of the Kaplows are alert to the issues of the day and face them with liberal consciousness. They deplore the descent into anti-Semitism and fascism of the national hero, Charles Lindbergh, even while they mourn the loss of his kidnapped son. They live through the Depression and work to extract Jews from Europe in the 1930s; they discuss Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs, and they stand up for the local librarian who lives with another woman. They rally against book-banning. They provide help to a girl made pregnant by incest and accept the unwed pregnancy and choice to abort by one of their daughters. They participate in marches for Civil Rights and assist indigent black neighbors.
And here is where the book faulters. With bravery and all the good will in the world, Silman presents her Black characters, particularly the Kaplow’s housekeeper, Carolina Williams, tinged with mid-century nostalgia. In some ways, Carrie stands as a practical, even moral, center of the book. Like so many other Black women from the South, she has left husband and young son at home to come north to work cleaning houses and raising other people’s children. She is a fully-drawn character, wise and practical, loving and loyal, with a few weaknesses, said to be treated by the Kaplows almost like a member of the family. Her physical care of the children, especially the younger daughter, Vivie, remains in their memories in images of “reversible” hands with “pinkish-peachy” palms and white fingernails, so much so that when Vivie meets a handsome Black man, it is inevitable that she feels safe and well cared for in his presence.
But one could wish that there be more hints that Carrie has a sensibility beyond what her employers observe. Would a Black southern housekeeper really admire the novel, “Gone with the Wind”? Would she enjoy the music of Stephen Foster, he of the line “the darkies were gay” and the mourning of the end of slavery in “My Old Kentucky Home”? Would she not sometimes miss raising her own son instead of lavishing her care on the Kaplows? One could wish here for a little more narrative distance and irony.
Nevertheless, there is much to admire and enjoy in the novel. The narrator skillfully weaves the story from inside various viewpoints, giving a rounded picture of each of the characters and a broader view of Jewish life in mid-twentieth century New York. Each one of the main characters grows and changes in interesting ways, and the reader cares for them with all their human flaws and endearing qualities. The title of the novel comes from Russian writer Alexander Herzen: “Art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness: these are the only real goods we have.” Silman evokes and celebrates it all.
