The social revolution we called Women’s Lib had already made inroads in my Westchester County, New York, public school world in the early 1970s.
By 1973, I’d persuaded my mother to sign my eighth-grade report cards “Nancy I. Klein” instead of “Mrs. Sidney B. Klein,” though we eighth-grade girls did sew both the boys’ and girls’ costumes for our class production of H.M.S. Pinafore.
Meanwhile, a few miles north of where I lived, Susan Kleinman and the other eighth-grade girls at her coed Jewish day school were still sewing the boys’ costumes for the Salute to Israel parade in 1978. The previous year, these girls had turned 12 without fanfare, as bat mitzvah celebrations had not yet caught on.
As Kleinman notes in her novel All Afternoon, set in 1978, feminism was “slow in coming” to the fictional New Jersey town of River Ridge. Presumably, this was also true in other Modern Orthodox enclaves of that era.
The protagonist, Marilyn Weisfeld, is a Shabbat-observing, kosher-keeping suburban mom who provides a quintessentially “Suzy Homemaker” experience for her husband and four daughters, having abandoned her literary dreams for marriage and motherhood 20 years earlier. When marriage proves unfulfilling physically and emotionally, Marilyn buries her disappointments in a quest for domestic perfection.
Feminism arrives slowly in Suburban world
Yes, Marilyn feels annoyed when her insecure college professor husband, Jerry, springs last-minute dinner guests on her. But she wouldn’t dream of saying no to whipping up a lavish meal on short notice – or even asking him to do the dishes afterward. When the youngest Weisfeld daughter ruins the dinner party by appearing in the dining room covered in vomit, it’s not Jerry who jumps up to help Marilyn change and bathe the child, but Jerry’s old friend and object of envy, Henry Goldfarb, a successful novelist living in Manhattan.
It soon becomes apparent that Henry has always carried a torch for Marilyn. Following the disastrous dinner party, they become entwined in a secret relationship that catalyzes Marilyn to take another look at the professional dream she gave up and begin to calculate the cost of reclaiming it.
Kleinman nails the little details in Marilyn’s gradual transformation, for instance, when she tosses her “Mrs. Jerry Weisfeld” note cards, experiments with takeout food for Shabbat, and boldly plans a bat mitzvah for her second daughter. The pop-culture context is on target as well, from a Pink Floyd poster in a teenage daughter’s room to the final episode of the Carol Burnett Show.
Marilyn could have symbolized many suburban moms of that time. By placing her in a Modern Orthodox community, the author creates a simultaneous opportunity to examine that milieu in the era of rising feminist sensibilities.
The portrait she paints of River Ridge is not flattering: gossipy Shabbat meal conversations, petty one-upmanship between parent subcommunities in the day school, advertisements for local women’s new cottage industries masquerading as Purim gift basket items:
“When Marilyn took off the shiny wrapping, she saw half a dozen samples of Carol Hackman’s ersatz cakes with her business card – Carol’s Cake Walk – stapled to each little Baggie, along with a rose-shaped candle from Paula Zuckerbrodt and a perfume sample from Doris Ellenbogen, who had recently become an Avon lady. Since when do candles and perfume belong in shalach manos? …
“Digging deeper, the girls found a coupon for Edna Karp’s math-tutoring business, SohCahToa Consultants, and a $10 gift certificate to the outlandishly expensive shoe boutique – Sole Train – that Bobbi Popkin had just opened (against zoning-board regulations) in her basement. Not a single hamantasch.”
Jerry gets brownie points for playing Torah trivia with his daughters on Friday nights, but, in general, he’s a useless parent and husband, every bit the “schmuck” Henry declares him to be. I would have liked Jerry to be a more nuanced character, but perhaps Kleinman was making the point that women in 1978 often chose to remain in bad marriages for financial security and to avoid the scandal of divorce.
How many women, like Marilyn, felt stupid “for having believed that going to college would set her on the path to some bright and shining future,” only to discover that a bachelor’s degree did not help her fold laundry, coordinate carpools, and chop celery? How many, like Marilyn, nevertheless still felt proud to turn a recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian cookbook (published in 1973) into a kosher “Chicken Tikka Marilyn” by substituting Coffee Rich for cream?
Part of what makes this book a highly entertaining page-turner is Kleinman’s skillful management of Marilyn and Henry’s relationship. She maintains a tantalizing undercurrent of sexual tension while avoiding predictability in the plotline.
This isn’t a cheesy potboiler but rather a novel of substance that gives an honest, thoughtful look into a pivotal period in modern social history, from a unique Jewish perspective. Those of us who raised our children in River Ridge-like communities decades after this story takes place will recognize how things changed – or didn’t. ■
Susan Kleinman will be featured, along with Rachel Tzvia Back and Nora Gold, at Literary Modi’in’s June Author Event, June 14 at 8 p.m. in person and over Zoom. Registration: juliezuckerman.com/event-info/literary-modiin-june-2026-author-event/form
ALL AFTERNOON:
A NOVEL
By Susan Kleinman
Volume 36 Books
320 pages, $17