The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

As a general rule, I tend to read much more non-fiction than novels, but I've been on a roll with fiction this summer and Susan Jane Gilman's The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street definitely falls in the category of great fiction. (Villa Triste and Elizabeth Is Missing are the other wonderful novels I've read recently.)

Five-year-old Malka Treynovsky arrives in New York in 1913, one of the huddled Eastern European Jewish masses yearning to breathe free. Her family wasn't even supposed to come to America, but now that they're here, Malka is determined to find her happy ending. Three months later she's crippled in an accident with an Italian ices peddler and abandoned. Taken in by the peddler's family, Malka becomes Lillian and forges a new identity and life for herself.

Lillian marries the handsome but illiterate Albert Dunkle, and the two of them build an empire of ice cream shops starting with a single truck. Soon, Lillian is the head of an ice cream empire and a celebrity in her own right, which is wonderful for her right up until it isn't: when she finds herself on trial for both tax evasion and assault. In the midst of this double ordeal, Lillian has decided to share her ordeal with us, darlings, and her voice is what makes Ice Cream Queen the masterpiece that it is. Part Jewish immigrant, part Italian immigrant, and with more than a touch of megalomania, Lillian's gravelly, no-nonsense voice is still ringing in my ears.