The First Desire by Nancy Reisman

Goldie Cohen is missing from her family’s home in Buffalo, New York. We learn this fact in the first few pages of Nancy Reisman’s absorbing and compelling novel, The First Desire. The year is 1929 and Goldie’s disappearance has thrown the Cohen family into turmoil. In her late twenties and the oldest of five adult children, Goldie directs the household after the recent death of their mother Rebecca. Has Goldie been kidnapped, has she fallen victim to a tragic accident or has she simply left?

Sister Sadie posts signs and notifies the police. After just a couple of weeks and deaf to the pleas of his grown children, Goldie’s father, Abe Cohen, decides that the family will sit Shiva. With this public pronouncement that “Goldie is dead to him", we learn that Goldie’s father believes Goldie has left the family. Abe Cohen’s patriarchal decision-making process gives us our first glance at his stubbornness, inflexibility and the emotional impact on his family.

Abe and Rebecca Cohen were born and raised in Poland where family traditions were rigid and choices few. The reliable routines of the Cohen’s family life in Buffalo provide both an oasis and a prison for the family. Except for Sadie, who lives with her husband Bill and their two daughters across town, the other four siblings live and work with their widowed father in the family jewelry store. Though the Cohen family members’ lives are intertwined, they each live on their own emotional island. They need each other and they resent each other. Their freedom is constrained by money, societal norms, and the customs of their Jewish faith.

However living in Buffalo, not Poland, has allowed these five adult siblings to consider their own needs. So though they remain diligent and dutiful to the family, they feel stifled and suffocated. By our modern sensibilities, they should enjoy the family camaraderie. Instead, the siblings feel oppressed by their roles and responsibilities. They experience the sweetness of being known by their family while seeking anonymity. The freedom to reinvent oneself or seek a new direction seems impossible. These adult siblings feel frozen in time; their maturation stunted. In addition, as the years pass, the shadow of anti-Semitism in the United States and the horrors in Europe hover in the Buffalo air.

Reisman’s novel explores the family interactions to offer an explanation of WHY Goldie did what she did. By probing into each of the character’s perspective (including Goldie), Reisman strengthens our understanding of their needs and longings. Their desires seem to center around autonomy and sexual fulfillment. Reisman describes her character’s daily thoughts and deeper aspirations with empathy and compassion.

I loved the aching humanity of this novel. I wish Reisman had delved into the details of these siblings’ early years, as it would have given readers a greater understanding of the dynamics between the family members in their adulthood. Yet, Nancy Reisman’s The First Desire beautifully illustrates how family love can both comfort and smother.