ABOUT:
An aged Jewish woman kvetches her way toward love while solving everyone else’s problems in Monheit’s bittersweet comic novel.
Goldie Mandell, a 90-year-old widow ensconced at the Riverdale Adult Community Residence in the Bronx, is sharp as a tack and busy with projects, fending off (and perhaps secretly welcoming) the affections of her neighbor, Harry, while finding a marriageable Jewish doctor for her granddaughter, Maxie Jacobson, a PhD student. She hits on a plan to accomplish this last goal by faking illnesses and making appointments with physicians whom her research indicates fit the profile, dragging Maxie along as her medical advocate to meet the prospects. Her strategy lands Maxie a man but, unfortunately, by Goldie’s lights, he’s the worst conceivable man: He’s T-Jam Bin Naumann, an adjunct art professor who moonlights as a driver for the car service Goldie takes to an appointment—and he dresses abominably (“A grown man, if that is what he is, in shorts?”, she observes. “Like he outgrew his pants and cut them off halfway. Why a hat and shorts? It’s either hot or cold. He can’t figure it out?”). Goldie gradually thaws toward the art professor, but age intrudes when one of her fake maladies turns real. Intertwined with Goldie’s present-day picaresque are her sometimes glowing, sometimes plangent reflections on the past—her childhood in Germany and exile to America in 1938, her exuberant young love with husband Mordy, and her estrangement from her daughter, Tamar, who moved to Berkeley and became a lawyer. Goldie is a spellbinding protagonist, full of dudgeon and crabby insights into all things newfangled. Monheit’s sparkling prose poetically and humorously conveys the collision of romantic dreams with crotchety reality: “He pulls himself up, then stands with one hand on his walker, and in the middle of everything, in the courtyard, he starts like he’s Nat King Cole, crooning how I’m unforgettable. What’s to forget? He doesn’t know me from Adam. Where is the staff when you need them?”A hilarious saga of family renewal and last-chance romance that plucks the heartstrings.
PRAISE AND RECOGNITION:
“Simi Monheit’s genius is to slowly reveal the complexity behind a stereotype. In Goldie Mandell, we have a new Jewish heroine—acerbic without bitterness, tender without sentimentality. ‘Who knew what I had to say was so interesting?’ says one of the most memorable characters in contemporary Jewish fiction. A book of pure delight.” —Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Like Dreamers, winner of the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Book of the Year Award
“An aged Jewish woman kvetches her way toward love while solving everyone else’s problems in Monheit’s bittersweet comic novel. Goldie is a spellbinding protagonist, full of dudgeon and crabby insights into all things newfangled. Monheit’s sparkling prose poetically and humorously conveys the collision of romantic dreams with crotchety reality. A hilarious saga of family renewal and last-chance romance that plucks the heartstrings. —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Monheit has the real deal knack of bringing her characters to life with the most surprising, charming, and readable voices. Goldie is a protagonist who will stay with me for a long time: a friend, a mentor, a pleasure.” —Josh Mohr, author of Model Citizen and Damascus
“This delightful, insightful debut novel crackles with the different ways to love and the many ways to harm. At its center, the flawed, fierce, and marvelous Goldie Mandell—a Jewish child wrenched from Nazi Germany; a young woman wildly in love; a mother and grandmother thick with love and regrets; and a hard-headed guardian of history, identity, tradition, and family. The Goldie Standard is a tragicomic balm against a too-often inhumane world rife with incalculable suffering that ultimately sends up a rally cry for togetherness, for grace, for peace, for being fully, majestically alive.” —Ethel Rohan, author of Sing, I
“Simi Monheit has created a novel that is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, a tour de force about the weight of generational trauma. Goldie is one of the most unforgettable characters I’ve encountered in years, and Monheit does an amazing job of capturing this elderly Holocaust survivor’s voice as she reminisces about the past while scheming to find her granddaughter a nice doctor for a husband. The way that Monheit weaves between Goldie’s life and that of her equally wonderful granddaughter’s—and between past and present—is nothing short of masterful. We need this novel right now, to shine a light into the darkness and remind us that of the transcendent power of love.” —Malena Watrous, author of You Follow Me; Lead Instructor for Stanford Continuing Studies Novel Certificate
AUTHOR VISITS:
Author visits with Simi Monheit are available via Adventures by the Book.