American Baby by Gabrielle Glaser

Author:Gabrielle Glaser [Glaser, Gabrielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

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As the children grew, the family started to feel crowded in their two-bedroom apartment, and they had now saved enough to make a down payment on a house in the suburbs. Like Esther and Ephraim, Margaret and George wanted space and quiet. They looked in New Jersey, at first in close-in towns that were too expensive, and finally in the southern part of the state outside Princeton. One of George’s colleagues had moved to a small town created on socialist principles in 1937 to help resettle Jewish garment workers on farmland as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Surrounded by acres of cornfields, dotted with red barns and silos, the new town was a world away from New York City.

The town, renamed Roosevelt after FDR’s death, did not retain its status as a federally funded utopia for long. But newspaper ads touting its fresh air, good schools, and easy commute into Manhattan continued to draw a trickle of Jewish New Yorkers into the 1960s and ’70s. Margaret and George were among them, and in August 1972, they moved into a modern bi-level house on a street called Farm Lane with four bedrooms and giant windows overlooking a thick grove of maples, elms, and oaks. George went to work in the city every day, and Margaret busied herself with adjusting to suburban life.

The years passed, and Margaret immersed herself in Roosevelt’s fabric. She volunteered to be class mother, again and again, pitching in at the library and chaperoning field trips. She helped make costumes for Purim and Halloween. She carpooled. She made sure the kids got their shots.

Some of their friends smoked pot, and there were also rumors of spouse-swapping. Margaret felt as opposed to this sort of experimentation as George had about moving to a commune. But who was she to judge? It was none of her business what other people did, and when gossip bubbled up, she changed the subject.

She thought the town was idyllic. To some extent, it was. Nobody even bothered to lock their cars or doors.

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