There's more disfunction than love on South Green Road

Janice Spector’s debut novel, 2207 South Green Road, is an account of the lives of an extended Jewish family in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. It’s set in the early 1960s; a time marker is two characters going to a first-run showing of “El Cid” with Charlton Heston, which was released in 1961.

We meet the family patriarch Morris Katofsky; his hypochondriac wife Becky; his daughter Esther; Esther’s pharmacist husband Harold; Esther and Howard’s overweight and lonely ten-year-old daughter Edna; Morris’s brother Abe (who has a gambling addiction); Morris’s two goyim employees in his floor-scraping business Willie and George (while the family is barely religious, many have strong feelings about non-Jews; a point the author underlines); Becky’s younger sisters Ceal and Libby; Ceal’s husband Al; Libby’s husband Joe; Becky’s successfully brothers Arthur and Izzie; Arthur’s wife Millie; Izzie’s wife Ethel; Lurlene, Morris and Becky’s black cleaning lady(?), housekeeper(?); and Ida.

Ida is interesting. Ceal and Al have a brain-damaged child Rosalie. When Ceal realized she needed help to care for Rosalie, she decided she needed a full-time resident aide. The agency sent “a slight, bespectacled Negro girl, holding all her belongings in a large brown paper bag.” The agency says Ida is 18; Ceal thinks she is no more than13, but welcomes her anyway. Indeed, Ceal and Al unofficially adopt her as a member of the family.

According to the author’s website, Spector “received her first awards for story and playwriting in the sixth grade in University Heights, Ohio. She attended college in Brooklyn, New York, and began her career at The New York Times, where she worked on the foreign and metro news desks. After relocating to Northern Virginia, she focused on political and media consulting. Her last employment was as a speech writer for a U.S. Congressional Committee. Most recently, she was a member of the National Finance Committee for Biden for President.”

While the novel is filled with incident—and stuffed with characters—there is not a lot of drama. The family celebrates Morris’s 63^rd birthday. Abe, who owns a candy store, has to borrow $1,000. Becky, with the connivance of a malleable Dr. Gold, becomes addicted to pain killers. Edna is put in the hospital to have her tonsils and adenoids taken out. Becky disappears for a while, frightening the family. Abe disappears, sending Morris to Florida to retrieve him. Becky begins to haunt Emergency Rooms in regional hospitals in her search for drugs. Harold, Esther, and Edna go on a vacation trip to Washington, D.C.

Howard is not a very sympathetic character. When Edna accidentally puts her hand through the storm door glass badly slashing her wrist and arm, Harold “refused to come even when they hollered that Edna was hurt. After all, he reasoned, it’s not like there isn’t anyone to take her to the hospital. He was entitled to his relaxation and it was Saturday night. Bonanza was on TV—he wasn’t going to miss that.” 

Although 2207 South Green Road is subtitled “a novel of love and dysfunction,” the incidents of disfunction tend to swamp the examples of love. For example, when the family would go to White Castle, Joe ordered a cheeseburger with grilled onions, ketchup bread-and-butter pickles, French fries, and birch beer. “After all the orders had been placed, Joe’s wife Libby would inform the server, ‘We need to make a change. My husband will have a plain hamburger. Nothing on it. No fries. No birch beer. He can have water.’” Perhaps it was her way of showing love.

In any case, 2207 South Green Road is an interesting evocation of one family’s life.

Interestingly, 2207 South Green Road is an actual address in the Cleveland suburb. You can look it up on Google Maps, which I did, and here it is.