THE GOLDIE STANDARD

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 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.