It’s 1961 and everything is changing in Florida.
Jim Crow strains to maintain its hold, the Cold War escalates, the US space program hits its stride, and the Jewish Goldens—determined to begin a new pastoral life along Florida’s central east coast—are just trying to hold on to their small orange grove near the excitement of Cape Canaveral.
In Goldens Are Here, Andrew Furman imagines with great empathy the individual members of the Golden family and their unique struggles and dreams during a single tumultuous citrus season. Isaac Golden must reckon between his ambition to create the perfect fruit and the business realities bearing down upon him given the booming postwar demand for cheap frozen concentrate; his beautiful wife, Melody, finds herself testing the boundaries that had so clearly governed her more conventional life in suburban Philadelphia; and their chronically ill son, Eli, wishes only to muster his strength so that he might enjoy the wide open outdoors and see a bobcat.
Inspired by true events surrounding a historic Florida citrus season and the civil rights struggle in a region not immediately associated with the movement, Goldens Are Here offers a glimpse of the sea changes occurring in Florida and the nation in the 1960s through the prism of one family’s negotiations with the land, their neighbors, and with each other.
Praise
"Aromatic and heady, fearless and far-reaching, this complicated novel imagines Florida fifty years ago, with all the beauty and all the threat of the era concentrated in a fine story of courage and place. The setting is mythic Florida, in an orange grove, in the middle of social transformation. Kudos to Furman for recreating this rich and unbelievable world. What I loved most was the book’s feast of language, its flavor and sensuality. And of course I loved Janisse."
—Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and The Seed Underground
"'There was something glorious about an examination with a stethoscope,' muses Isaac Golden, the searching, hopeful patriarch in Andrew Furman’s novel, Goldens Are Here. 'This laying on of hands. This reverent silence. . . . Here was the real, Isaac thought.' Readers looking for the real will find it in Furman’s careful attunement to place (tamarind, lantana, wax myrtle; Parson Brown, Hamlin, Valencia) and time (the Space Age and the Civil Rights struggle). Furman gives this moment in our collective history its due with nuance, warmth, and a palpable sense of family grief and love."
—Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse
"Andrew Furman's Goldens Are Here is a smart, generous, and engrossing look at the civil rights struggle in Florida. A fascinating meditation on what it means to be a neighbor in a highly unjust world."
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story
“Furman’s characters live, breathe, hurt, and love vibrantly on the page as you follow them on their journeys among the orange groves and around town as they discover what for each of them—like Isaac’s seed experimentations—seems an unlikely pursuit, which is the heart of Goldens Are Here. . . .The lifeblood of Furman’s novel is the seeming conviction that each of his main characters’ personal experiments are worthy pursuits because trial and error is how we learn to love one another more deeply. . . . Even Furman himself took a chance with such an ambitious novel, but Goldens Are Here astutely investigates one of America’s cultural epochs by peeling back the historical rind of who we were and reveals who we still are, deep down, as Americans.”
—Mike Robbins, Flyway
“Andrew Furman’s Goldens Are Here (Green Writers Press) is a highly original story about a Jewish family and its connection to the land. . . . Furman captures the era, with the Cold War escalating, racial relations strained under Jim Crow laws, and anti-Semitism present too. He’s also attuned to the singular landscape of the orange groves through the seasons, including summer with its ‘dragon-breath heat’ . . . . Furman creates memorable characters, with beautiful prose and a love of the natural world—detailing palmetto, magnolia, sweet gum, and other trees, as well as orange varietals—and some Yiddish vernacular thrown in. Readers are likely to crave a glass of fresh-squeezed juice.”
—Sandee Brawarsky, The New York Jewish Week
“Goldens Are Here is a fine, highly original novel. . . . The Goldens are clearly outsiders, and the way they are addressed by many of the townspeople carries a brand of politeness that barely veils a cultural tradition of anti-Semitism. Author Andrew Furman portrays how Isaac and Melody deal with their displacement and discomfort with skill and sensitivity. . . . This is an extremely ambitious novel, delightfully blending the ups and downs of domestic life, an exploration of culturally engrained prejudices, the East-Central Florida ethos, the major issues of national and international concern, and the vibrant interplay of man and nature. I love the author’s chutzpah in bringing this all together, and I love the cascades of language and lists that carry it along.”
—Phil Jason, Florida Weekly