Rags to riches on the Lower East Side

Book Review By Gloria Kestenbaum
New York Jewish Week

From the reeking slums of the Lower East Side to the rarefied air of Park Avenue and Palm Beach, Susan Jane Gilman’s The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street is a tart page-turner across the 20th-century Jewish American experience.

New York Times bestselling novelist Gilman will discuss her book on Oct. 20 as part of the JCC’s Cultural Arts & Book Fest.

Lillian Dunkle (née Malka Treynovsky), the picaresque heroine handicapped by poverty and a crushed leg, is neither pretty nor likeable, but in the tradition of the hardscrabble American rags-to-riches entrepreneur, she’s smartly indomitable and emboldened by obstacles. A combination of Leona Helmsley, Tom Carvel and Becky Sharp, with a hint of Joan Rivers, our heroine embodies the best and worst traits of each.

We first meet the self-described “weisenheimer,” now the elderly doyenne of an ice-cream empire, in the booming 1980s. Reviled by the press and under indictment for a series of charges, some trumped-up, some true, the titular Ice Queen reviews her life, from escaping the pogroms in 1913 to meeting President and Mamie Eisenhower at the White House.

But Lillian is no Forrest Gump; she’s sometimes admirable, often despicable, but always smart and interesting.

The author’s research is meticulous. Gilman’s Dickensian description of the Lower East Side of the early-20th century conjures up the intensity of such classics as The Rise of David Levinsky or Call it Sleep. She’s also done her homework on the history of the ice cream industry; from a formula in the journals of a Renaissance polymath to passages about selling melting ice cream from a broken-down truck (the real Carvel story), the historical references are seamlessly woven into the story and add an extra topping to an already delightful tale.

The Lower East Side is part of our American mythology as much as the Wild West. Gilman’s talent is taking sentimental stock characters and turning them inside out. Instead of the loving and sacrificing parents of, for instance, my favorite childhood book, All-of-a-Kind Family, Malka’s parents are hateful and abandoning. The exigencies of the American melting pot have dissolved traditional ties; the newly christened Lillian adopts the Catholicism of her new Italian family with few glances back.

Lillian’s admirable toughness hardens into an unpleasant shrillness as she ages; a frosty, marcelled cliché, her speech is sprinkled with venom and unconvincing Yiddishisms, and Gilman allows her character to evolve on her own dislikable terms. It’s a bold move and one that pays off in this myth-debunking story of a fully lived life.

The JCC’s Cultural Arts & Book Fest will present author Susan Jane Gilman on Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. at the Boonshoft Center for Jewish Culture and Education, 525 Versailles Dr., Centerville. Tickets are $5 in advance, $8 at the door, and are available by calling 610-1555, at the Boonshoft CJCE or click here.

To read the complete October 2015 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.