GOODMAN, ALLEGRA

GOODMAN, ALLEGRA (1967– ) U.S. novelist and short story writer. Goodman, the daughter of academics, was born in Brooklyn, raised in Hawaii, and educated at Harvard and Stanford. She has written works that are at ease with Jews who are urban as well as urbane. Her focus is invariably on the nature of community and its ability to transmit a Judaism that can maintain the allegiance – both ritualistically as well as personally – of her characters. She has pointed out that George Eliot's Middlemarch, with its treatment of a "whole community" containing individuals that are "so alive, so real," was an inspiration. Goodman's works often do just that. Total Immersion (1989), a widely praised collection of stories, was followed by Family Markowitz (1996), a series of related stories about a family's adjustment to the ruptures as well as blandishments of modern life. Her Kaaterskill Falls (1998) deals with the political and religious conflicts of an Orthodox Jewish community whose characters must not only accept a new leadership but also adjust their ambitions to a regulated life. Paradise Park (2001), with its pathos and humor, offers readers the God-seeking but all-too-human Sharon Spiegelman, seeking revelation in her travels, beginning in Hawaii. In 2006 she published Intuition, set in a Cambridge, Mass., research institution. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: D. Welch, "Author Interviews: Allegra Goodman," at: Powells.com. (Lewis Fried (2nd ed.)