The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights By Kitty Zeldis (Harper)

By definition, a potboiler is an artistic work of dubious merit designed only to make the writer money.

That’s not The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights. This book is a plot boiler: an artistic work designed to discuss a point.

Both this work and author Kitty Zeldis’s previous novel, Not Our Kind, explore the interactions of Jews with the non-Jewish world in an earlier era. Dressmakers is more complex than its predecessor, centered on three seemingly disparate stories that Zeldis manages to weave together.

Bea Carr, a young Jewish woman, leaves Russia because of the pogroms. She immigrates to New Orleans in the late 19th century and meets non-Jewish Clay Robichaud, who, despite societal bias, doesn’t mind dating a Jew. “You’re unique. Soulful,” he tells her. 

Unfortunately, his family doesn’t appreciate “soulful” and refuses to recognize their relationship, even after Bea discovers she’s pregnant. The two elope. After Clay dies of yellow fever, Bea puts the baby up for adoption.

The novel follows Bea as she becomes the proprietor of a brothel in New Orleans and, later, as she moves to Brooklyn with Alice Wilkerson, an orphaned teenager and the younger sister of one of Bea’s prostitutes, in search of a missing piece of her past.

In Brooklyn, the two meet wealthy, upper-class and newly married Catherine Berrill, who is looking for the perfect dress as well as a break from her own sorrows. In a seeming parallel to Bea’s marriage, Catherine’s mom objects to her own daughter’s union because her intended, Stephen, is Irish. Though her mother finds solace in the fact that “At least he’s not Italian. Or, God forbid, a Jew.”

Complicated threads of love and fear, loss and heartbreak connect the women, even as the book moves toward a somewhat predictable denouement.

Nevertheless, Zeldis has so sympathetically drawn the three women and their struggles that readers are likely to keep turning the pages hoping for a happy ending.

Curt Schleier, a freelance writer, teaches business writing to corporate executives.