Wow, did I love this book!!! Author, Susan Jane Gilman finds just the right voice for this narrating this story. Looking back at her life, narrator, Malka Treynovsky a.k.a Lillian Dunkle, a.k.a "The Ice Cream of Orchard Street" uses a smart aleck, sassy, stereotyped New Yorker characteristics to describe how she came to end up in the situation she now finds herself at the age of 70.
Using the historical perspective of the immigrant lifestyle found in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the early 1900, Gilman paints a picture of what life was like after getting off the boat thinking you had arrived in the land of plenty. The Treynovsky family arrives at Ellis Island with a father, mother and four daughters. They have escaped the pogroms of Russia but have no relatives in America. Life is tough for the family in America and early on Malka is abandoned by her family after being injured in an accident on the streets of New York. Luckily, taken in by an Italian family, she is taken care of and learns that with cunning and a strong work ethic she can be successful.
Many of the experiences she lives through as child shape the person she will be as an adult. The lessons of her childhood play out throughout her life in how she deals with the people around her and how she reacts to the situations she finds herself in. She always seems to be in competition with everyone and even when her life is one filled with love, luxury and satisfaction she is still not happy.
Told in such an entertaining way, the lesson the reader can take away from this story is that fame and fortune do not buy happiness. That success is really when one recognizes that their life is good.
Albert Dunkle, Lillian's husband, is a simple man who sees the good in life. He is happy in his marriage and satisfied with the success of their Ice Cream business. He does not have the need for revenge or oneupmanship that consumes Lillian.
Very interestingly, Gilman brings in some wonderful tidbits of history about ice cream to this story.
One piece of fascinating history is how popular ice cream was during World War II. Each branch of the military tried to one up the others serving ice cream to their troops. Some made their own ice cream, while in 1945 the first "floating ice cream parlor was built for the sailors in the western Pacific Ocean. In the book, Albert Dunkle serves his country by creating the ice cream machine and operating it on the floating ice cream parlor, "Only the United States of America deemed ice cream 'an essential item for troop morale'. And it alone continued producing, ordering ice cream freezers on submarines, ice cream freezers on tankers, ice cream freezers on cargo ships. Over the course of the war, the United States military became the largest ice cream manufacturer in history."
Later on Gilman fits in the polio epidemic into the plot line. Ice cream it seems also played a part in the polio scare of the 1950s. During the summer of 1952 there was an outbreak of polio cases among children in the US. Dr Benjamin Sandler decided it was due to the increase in sugar from eating ice cream. Ice cream sales plummeted. But in the book, Lillian finds a way to turn the tide and become the most successful ice cream business during this scare. She uses her infirmity to sell ice cream. She also is smart enough to recognize the need for refrigerated trucks to help dispense the vaccine after it is developed by Jonas Salk. "Since the vaccine needed to be refrigerate, Bert and I volunteered Dunkle's fleet of ice cream trucks to help transport them across the country. Our franchise owners themselves got involved recruiting 'Polio Pioneers', as they were called....Nobody gives us credit now-a-days, but I am telling you: Dunkles was responsible for encouraging hundreds of thousands of children to get inoculated against polio."
Susan Jane Gilman has done a terrific job of writing a entertaining story that encompasses many interesting historical points of the 1900s from immigration to the Lower East to modern day life
in America. She describes vividly the lifestyle of the people living on the Lower East of NY. She creates three lovable characters in Lillian, Albert and her grandson, Jason. She builds suspense as the story unfolds because Lillian keeps referring to a court case she is involved in for trouble she has gotten herself into. She tells her story looking back over her life leading up to the mistakes she has made. Gilman's writing style really makes the characters come to life. Her supporting cast is also well defined. This is a fun enjoyable book you will not want to put down.
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