One morning in 1947, Eleanor Moskowitz is on her way to a job interview when two taxicabs collide on a Manhattan street. Eleanor, riding in one, suffers a mild injury, though she’s more upset at missing her interview. But the passenger in the other taxi, Patricia Bellamy, insists on bringing Eleanor to her Park Avenue home and tending to her.

As it happens, Patricia’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Margaux, needs a tutor, and Eleanor has teaching experience and a Vassar degree. More importantly, Margaux takes to her instantly, as she has to no other person besides her parents and her mother’s brother, her Uncle Tom. As an angry, whiny child suffering a disability — she had polio and walks with a cane — she normally dislikes everyone on sight, so the connection to Eleanor means something to Patricia.

Trouble is, Eleanor’s Jewish, and Patricia’s an anti-Semite — the genteel sort, to be sure, but her husband, Wynn, is louder and more pointed about it. In fact, he’s louder and more pointed about everything, a drunken boor with roving eyes and hands. But the Bellamys hire Eleanor anyway, because Margaux likes her, and they’re desperate for someone to get through to their daughter.

But Eleanor has her doubts too. As her mother says, these prospective employers are “not our kind,” and the newly hired tutor feels intimidated by their wealth, apparent ease, and, well, perfection, observable even in the building where they live, only three blocks from her own.

Zeldis has New York down — the clothing styles, social mores, scenery, and, most germane, workplace anti-Semitism. The author has a gift for the unexpected, the essence of tension, so that even when the plot seems predictable, events don’t turn out quite the way you think. I also like Zeldis’s knack for getting tremendous mileage out of a simple situation that’s actually very complicated, especially once Patricia’s charming, individualist brother happens on the scene and hits it off with Eleanor right away.

The Bellamys’ prejudice lurks behind every interaction, as if the elephant in the room were trumpeting loudly, except they try not to hear it. It’s the problem that simply won’t go away, and Zeldis resists any temptation at easy fixes. For the most part, until the last quarter of the novel, the plot unfolds naturally, with no apparent guiding hand.

Where Not Our Kind falls short, I think, lies in the characters, especially the men. Wynn is a cartoon; Zeldis belatedly announces his merits, trying to mitigate his villainy, but you don’t see them. Likewise, though Tom’s charming, he’s elusive, and though I can see Eleanor admire his ease and wish she had it, and that she soaks up his kindness and sensitivity, that’s different from love. I like Patricia and her daughter, who seem real, and Eleanor’s mother, Irina, who can observe that she’s unhappy about decisions Eleanor has made, but that unhappiness isn’t fatal.

The heroine’s another story. I sympathize with Eleanor, but once I finished the book, I tried to remember her flaws and couldn’t. She’s unsure of herself and a little envious, but those hardly count, and she seems remarkably self-possessed, seldom at a loss for the words she needs to stick up for herself. She grows toward feminism without using the term, a worthy theme and apt for the time, but I find Patricia more rounded.

Further, Eleanor’s Jewishness is entirely cultural, and though many novelists draw such characters, I often suspect that they do so merely for the inconvenience that observance causes in the workaday world, or because they’re not confident they can do otherwise. Zeldis plainly can; late in the book, Eleanor recoils inwardly at pork on a plate. She could have, should have done that throughout the narrative—not necessarily as strongly, just to acknowledge her difference, her otherness, which she notes in many other ways.

Finally, Not Our Kind, despite its marvelous descriptions of clothing or architecture, doesn’t feel like 1947. There’s no sense of relief after a war, or even that there was a war, though we’re told that Wynn didn’t fight, and that Patricia lost a brother. There’s nothing about popular culture, politics (as in anti-Communist hysteria, whose roots lay in anti-Semitism), or other goings-on — surprising, given that Gentleman’s Agreement, a movie about covert anti-Semitism, came out that year. ( )

Not Our Kind is a book about a young Jewish woman who had a serendipity taxi accident with a non-Jewish woman. The Jewish woman wound up falling in love with the non-Jewish, wealthy woman's brother. The story was good but unfortunately came to a complete stop. Perhaps writing endings is a job all of its own and it does not seem fair to rate a book on that alone, but in this review it is the situation.
Perhaps, the author plans another book. Unfortunately only three stars were awarded to this book. ( )

Didn't quite end the way I wanted it to. ( )

I listened to the CD and thoroughly enjoyed it except that Margaux's voice was particularly....awful? Of course, she really did capture the whining nature of this child!!! The book itself was really well told. That fact that this author used this pseudonym instead of her real name will make it a little challenging to find other works by her. ( )

What a lovely writing style. I thought this was beautifully written.
Eleanor Moskowitz and Patricia meet one morning when their taxis collide.
Eleanor missed a job interview and got a bit beaten up in the accident. So Patricia invited her to her home to get cleaned up.
At the time she is aware of the fact that Eleanor is the only Jewish person that’s ever been invited into their home. They are just a few years post war and even though Patricia doesn’t judge Eleanor per se, she does feel disconnected from her.

Things get more complicated when Patricia’s daughter Margaux meets Eleanor. Margaux has been home schooled since she was inflicted with polio. She struggles socially but seems to instantly bond with Eleanor. Given that Eleanor used to be a teacher, Margaux suggests that they hire her as her tutor.

Patricia knows that her husband and her neighbors would judge Eleanor for being Jewish. So, she does hire her because she feels it’s the best thing for Margaux. But she asks Eleanor to give her name as Moss rather than Moskowitz.

This is just one more way Eleanor feels unlike her employer. Patricia is very wealthy too.

While on the surface, Patricia is essentially kind to Eleanor, she doesn’t quite see them as equals. And the gulf between them is emphasized when Eleanor developed feelings for Patrica’s brother Tom.
Things definitely take a turn for the worse in Eleanor and Patricia’s relationship around this time.

I thought the author did a very believable job of fleshing out the characters. No one was perfect. I found the changes within their relationships interesting. Friends? Employee/employer? Equals? Nothing was easy for anyone in this book but it’s an interesting journey for all of them.

( )