Rachel Beanland (Photo by Becca Duval)
Secrets are at the center of Richmonder Rachel Beanland’s first novel, “Florence Adler Swims Forever” (Simon & Schuster, $25.99). Family and friends conceal them in an effort that’s thought to be best for all concerned in the Atlantic City of 1934.
The book, released today, July 7, has been chosen as the Barnes & Noble Book Club pick for July and has been named to numerous summer reading lists: Amazon's Best Books for July, Parade Magazine's Best Summer Books and Good Morning America's "25 Novels You'll Want Read This Summer." Beanland will launch the novel on Instagram Live tonight at 7 p.m.
Image courtesy Simon & Schuster
The story involves disappearance, grief, deceptions, misunderstandings and the complicated filigrees of love. Glistening within the tale’s eddies is a sense of myth, given that little remains of the novel’s Atlantic City. The tides of preference have swept it away. The ambition of the titular 19-year-old Florence training to swim the English Channel seems an athletic labor of ancient lore.
Though a work of historical fiction, the kernel of the narrative is derived from events in Beanland’s own family history. Here, too, is a poignant relevancy embodied by Anna Epstein, the daughter of family friends stranded in Nazi Germany. She’s sent from Berlin by her parents, escaping under the guise of attending college in the United States. Anna wants her parents to join her, but deprived of their savings in Germany and faced with the nearly insurmountable obstacle of obtaining enough money to satisfy U.S. entry requirements, she is marooned both in Atlantic City and within her conflicted heart. Anna’s sense of homesickness is paired with tearful confusion as she contemplates how she can pine for a place she resents. Florence communes with Anna’s sadness.
The novel’s revolving perspectives involve Florence’s family, which includes her parents, Joseph and Esther Adler, immigrants who’ve built a prosperous bakery business; her sister, first-born daughter Fannie; and Fannie’s schemer husband, Isaac Feldman, who plots to make a killing in the Florida real estate market. The Feldmans’ adorable daughter, Gussie, gives another perspective on the doings of adults.
“Both of my mother’s parents grew up in Atlantic City,” Beanland says. “Gussie is based on my mother’s mother.” The child demonstrates her precociousness early on while watching Florence in discussion with her swim coach, Stuart Williams, the matinee-idol-handsome scion of an Atlantic City hotelier. He’s less interested in the family business than he is in lifeguarding, swimming and Florence. During a surfside discussion, Gussie mimics her aunt’s gestures. She places a hand on one hip, freeing the other to “make big, important gestures. Stuart crossed his arms at this chest, and she tried that, too, but it didn’t feel as natural. Eventually when he noticed she was mimicking him, he winked at her and she tied her arms in knots behind her back.”
“For European Jews arriving in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, there’s already keen competition — you can’t be the town’s only specialty baker,” Beanland explains. Some went West or South to find homes, and to Atlantic City, which was “a new frontier but only an hour by train from Philadelphia. That growth of tourism was happening alongside the Jewish immigration piece.”
The growth is illustrated by Beanland’s description of the expansion of the Williams’ hotel. The resort begins in the 1870s as humble Covington Cottage but transforms into “The Covington,” dubbed “The Skyscraper by the Sea” for its twin 23-story towers. The restaurant’s Cordon Bleu-trained chef prepares meals for vacationing Americans detailed in menus written entirely in French. The Covington “offers the modern amenities such as radios, telephones and baby cages.” Those things allowed tykes fresh air by placing them into cages anchored in windows.
“Yes, they would be dangling many stories above ground,” Beanland explains, laughing. “When you’re researching, so much comes up, and you have to be careful about maintaining the story and not getting bogged down.”
Florence Adler goes swimmingly along, negotiating currents of emotions and memory, and you’ll cheer her on, forever.
