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.