Paradise Farm

By Brenda S. Webster

Book Overview

Set in 1929, before the Crash, Paradise Farm probes the disintegration and rebirth of a wealthy Jewish family at a time when the New York art world was in ferment, women's roles were changing, the psychoanalytic movement was burgeoning--and Hitler's menace was recognized only by a prescient few.

Set in 1929, before the Crash, Paradise Farm probes the disintegration and rebirth of a wealthy Jewish family at a time when the New York art world was in ferment, women's roles were changing, the psychoanalytic movement was burgeoning-and Hitler's menace was recognized only by a prescient few.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791440990
• ISBN13: 9780791440995
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.3"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

An intimate portrayal of an artist and woman in the 1920s

Brenda Webster's Paradise Farm is a page turner. Each page reveals a little more of the inner lives of people living in a time that, in retrospect, was extraordinary. It was 1929, before the stock market crash but not before Mein Kampf. It was a time of change for women, for art, and for human explorations of the mind. Within this maelstrom, a Jewish family--Agnes, the mother, and Lara and Johnnie, grown daughter and son--move on after the death of husband and father Eugene. They confront what it is to be Jewish and what they have meant to each other. Johnnie's journey is marked by his prescient grasp of the threat of Hitler, a insight that is largely ignored by those around him. Agnes emerges from Eugene's shadow. Will she find, as she puts it, something to do with the rest of her life? Lara struggles to define herself as an artist while experimenting with new sexual freedoms. The least compelling aspect of this novel is its portrayal of Lara's relationships with the various men in her life, whether brother, lover, or would-be-lover. No relationship, even the crucial and incestuous one with Johnnie, is developed to the point that the reader can really understand or care about it. Her departed father's influence on her burgeoning art, however, is convincingly woven into her development as a painter. By the end of the year in which Eugene dies, Agnes and her children have all left home--their Paradise Farm. And we have been given a glimpse into a family fettered by sexual infidelity and incest. This is a tale of what we now call a dysfunctional family at a pivotal point in their lives. Lara provides the principal lens through which we view this family and their times. In its intimate portrayal of her growth as an artist first, and then as a woman, Paradise Farm is a story for every contemporary woman who has ever asked how family and work fit together in her life.