Customer Reviews

Open Doors

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Acclaimed ceramic artist Elaine Gordon has always placed her beloved husband Neil above her work and their four children with her vocation coming in a distant second. Thus when her soulmate anchor dies, she is more than just grieving; she is lost. Each of her adult children loves their mother even if she has always been distant from them. Each wants her to leave the New York City area and move near one of them. They persuade Elaine to visit them.

Elaine goes to see Sarah nee Sandy and her grandchildren in Jerusalem. Next she travels to California to spend time with Peter and more grandchildren. Her third global trek is to Russia where Lisa wants to become a single mom by adopting a child. Finally, the one trip she dreads going to is New Mexico where Denis and his gay boyfriend live.

Elaine's journey is on two levels: the obvious globetrotting trips to her offspring and the metaphysical journey of spiritual learning as her children, their significant others, and their offspring make solid mentors. The extended cast is fully developed but it is Elaine as the focus who holds it together. Although her revelatory transformation seems unrealistic (sort of like Ebenezer Scrooge's change), OPEN DOORS is a deep look at a person learning in her late middle ages what is important in life.

Harriet Klausner

Before there was chick lit, there were authors like Gloria Goldreich, Belva Plain, etc., who wrote novels that were less formulaic than the romance novels but certainly a far cry from being contemporary versions of Jane Austen. Collectively, they specialized in a kind of book world version of comfort food; undemanding plotlines, emotions that are never too turbulent, and crises that are always resolved in just the right way, leaving the reader to heave a happy, slightly tearful sigh when she (inevitably she) turns the final page.

Having read some of these in my college days, I picked up a copy of this book out of some kind of nostalgia, only to discover that I have long since outgrown the overblown writing and underdeveloped characters. In this outing, Goldreich takes a widowed mother of four (who had always placed her relationships with her children behind her ties to her husband) on a tour to each of those children's homes. Each child perplexes her in some way; each child has some crisis in their life which Elaine (o, miracle!) can help resolve, it seems, whether that means saving one son's marriage or the other's artwork. In remarkably few pages, lifelong resentments or problems between parent and child are resolved, over and over again. And the climax -- where on earth will Elaine live? -- is just silly.

That said -- this will still appeal to a reader who likes her literary version of rice pudding -- something a bit on the bland side, whether it comes to writing or plot. Someone who'd rather read warm & fuzzy "women's lit" than edgy "chick lit". Just don't expect anything more than perfunctory attention to characters, plot or writing; this is a writer long past her best.

I ordered this book because it was chosen for our book club.

I found it rather light reading. Something to take to the beach.

Gloria Goldreich is now one of my favorite authors. Too bad so many of her books are only available from second-hand sellers. OPEN DOORS is a lovely book about people you'd like to know. This is the #1 criteria for me when I read a book: are these characters people I would like to know? If the answer is yes, I can root for them and really care about what happens to them. If the answer is no, it's difficult to emotionally relate. When I teach my writing classes, I emphasize again and again how important it is to create characters we can care about. And Goldreich has done just that with Elaine and her brood. Although I'm not Jewish, I love reading about the Jewish experience and the section of the book that takes place in Jerusalem was highly satisfying. As a mother of grown children, I also found Elaine's relationships with her adult children realistic and relatable. I have also tried to be the kind of mother who doesn't interfere and who has allowed her children to make their own decisions without passing judgment. Most of the time I succeeded. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of my children didn't appreciate my "hands off" mothering -- and would actually have liked having a mother like mine who called me twice a day and wanted to discuss every little thing going on in my life. Goldreich shows a real family learning to understand each other at a time when they can finally stop indulging in the petty jealousies and rivalries all families experience. This is a marvelous book from a marvelous writer and I'm looking forward to reading everything of Goldreich's I can get my hands on. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The book fascinated me from its preview. It is exactly where I seem to be at this stage of my life. In addition, I have spoken to many other widows with very similar situations. Not exactly a problem but yet could become one with the wrong decision. I could feel for her. Made me feel like I'm not alone with a similar problem...what to do. I enjoyed the book and found it very easily to put myself in the character of the widow. Arlene Angel

Open Doors. By Gloria Goldreich. Mira. 496 pages. $19.95.

Reviewed by LORRAINE FRAZIER

For those of you who are weary of national elections, played out by the financial meltdown, and glaze over every time you hear the word recession, here is a book for you. It is about a woman, a family, and the things that matter, after all. In Open Doors, the reader is invited inward into Elaine Gordon's life at the moment of her beloved husband's death, where you will cross the river with her into the land of widowhood, from one stepping stone to the next, as she visits the homes and lives of each of her children. "I have four children, all scattered," Elaine says. This is the story about recollection and reconnection.
In large part, she is meeting these adults for the first time. Raising their family, she and her husband had carefully "respected their children's privacy" as a reaction to their own early years as children of Orthodox Jewish immigrants living together in small apartments and sharing communal family expectations, which were both a source of pride and the basis of her career as a working artist in ceramics, and his as a psychiatrist. Accepting their children's decisions, believing they were giving them the gift of independence while she and her husband lived a life of visible devotion to each other, the messages were mistaken for indifference. To Sarah, Peter, Lisa, and Denis, Elaine and her husband seemed to need nothing but each other and their work
As a result, these children proceeded to live their adulthoods in very different ways. What has changed now, as she accepts the emotionally truthful invitations of her four children, is that Elaine is the immigrant into each of the worlds of her children, and she explores the extent to which she fits into these individual homelands. Like any displaced person, she is fully realized within her own life, but that life is no longer available to her. These new experiences form the "open doors" of the book's title, through which she and her children can face their respective truths, learn to grow together, and see the differences as yet more open doors.
She first visits her daughter Sandy, now Sarah, who lives in Jerusalem with her husband Moshe, who has devoted his life to Torah study. The household is bustling with children, her home business, and people from the community.
Elaine is at a loss to understand her daughter's complete conversion to the religious life. She explains that Sarah's grandparents had been poisoned by all that had happened to them in Russia. She tells her, all they kept were joyless rituals . . . and the fear. They went to the synagogue to weep. She and her husband didn't want their children's lives to be darkened as theirs had been. Sarah responds that when she came to Jerusalem and experienced Shabbat with a local Orthodox family, she realized what she had been missing and what she wanted. Clearly the stories are filled with painful realizations, but Elaine risks these truths in order to draw closer.
She next visits her son Peter, an affluent film producer living in Los Angeles with his family. A gallery owner to whom Elaine has been introduced explains how almost every new Los Angelino is yearning to be transformed, reborn, and to be far enough away so their parents can't see what they are doing. Elaine ponders her son's stage-set life--new props, new costumes--and a daughter-in-law she never warmed to, to discover the simple human drama that draws her into a role that she has never played before.
Her odyssey next brings her to the land of her daughter Lisa in Philadelphia. Lisa has fashioned herself a life of complete independence and self-reliance as a physician and business owner of medical laboratories. She is the child who seems to have the least rapport with her mother, her father being "her parent of choice," but has nonetheless asked Elaine to accompany her to Russia in her attempt to adopt a child. And so the two women travel to the country of their ancestors, one to claim, the other to reclaim, a daughter. Vividly depicted, this richly rewarding story is at once a mystery, action drama, and romance; the characters you meet, real, believable, and memorable.
Her fourth child, Denis, lives in Santa Fe. He is a man who has balanced excellence with kindness and most resembles her husband in so many ways. But he has made the life decision most difficult for her (and her husband when he was alive) of any of her children. She is a Jewish mother from an Orthodox background who has to understand her gay son or forever be divided from him, and embrace her revelation that he is perhaps the closest to both of his parents in his ideals, his art, and the person he turned out to be. But Elaine's journey has a purpose: "she wanted to understand her children; she wanted to balance the ledger of their resentments and their love, to understand the lives they had chosen and where she herself fit into those lives," and so she presses forward into this unfamiliar territory.
Elaine's peregrinations make her a stronger and braver person as she takes the initiative to help her children, and she sees the continuity of how her own mother, from such a different background, did the same for her. She draws on her innate strength to stand up for what is right and beautiful in their lives and defends them as she would not have previously done. She actualizes her ability to mend, protect, and bring joy to her children, and in so doing moves from loving, to participating in love. She reacts in ways that she would not have when her husband was alive, when she and he responded as one, and thus becomes herself.
This novel reads truthfully enough to be an autobiography. The writing style is so fluid and natural that the reader forgets the words and enjoys the journey. Elaine's vocation as an artist provides a beautiful vehicle to describe the various places she visits in a visual fashion, like a box of paints. Her art, vision, and story come together in that Elaine, throughout the book, is creating a mural of ceramic tiles as a memorial for her husband. Her descriptions of her experiences resonate with color, light, and sensual layers of glazes. Shimmering with the tints of Santa Fe sunsets, the golden light of California, the grey damp mist of Russia, and shades of the hills of Judea, Elaine fires tiles in her kiln like a baker of bread. When, in the end, they fit together and are installed in the hospital where her husband worked and will be remembered, it symbolizes more than a tribute to one man. Her mural, like the book, turns into a mosaic describing a family's collected tales of courage, artfulness, and hope.

LORRAINE FRAZIER has a background in art, lives in Rhode Island, and works for the Rhode Island School of Design.

This book is one step above a harlequin romance. It is filled with trite characters, trite scenes and an unbelievable marriage. The author uses $50 words where a $5 word will do. She loves using the word "sere", for example ,when that will mean nothing to the average reader who selects her book. One saving grace is that the 487 pages are in larger than average print and thus will take half as long to read. She knows her reader is an older woman.