On The Bookshelf
`Redeeming Eve'
Nicole Bokat's first novel tackles
mother-daughter issues.
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ve Sterling, the 30-year-old
heroine of the comic novel
Redeeming Eve, is a neurotic
Jewish New Yorker with a
chaotic life who is obsessed with 18th-
century literature. She names her car
Mr. Knightly and writes a thesis titled
"Emma's Entitlement: Jane
Austen's Feminist Role Models."
She dreams of escaping the stress-
ful demands of academia, mar-
riage and motherhood. Mostly
she wants to escape her overbear-
ing Jewish mother, Maxie
Sterling,
b3 a television social worker
who has taken maternal intrusive-
ness to a new level by discussing
her daughter Eve's fertility on her
nationally syndicated television
show, Mornings with Maxie.
Over a recent cup of coffee in
Greenwich Village, Nicole Bokat, the 41-
year-old pretty and witty author of the
funny first novel (Permanent Press; $24),
insists that Redeeming Eve is purely fiction.
Never mind that Bokat is a self-
admitted neurotic Jewish New Yorker
with a chaotic life who has a doctorate
in literature and loves Jane Austen.
Never mind that her own mother,
Mona, recently tracked her down and
had her paged at the radiologist's
office as she was getting a mammo-
gram, and calls her up to impart such
advice as "It's un-American that your
kids don't ride bikes." Or that Bokat
gave birth to her second child at Long
Island Jewish Hospital, where her
mother is a neo-natal social worker.
"My mother had just won some big
fight with her supervisor at work. All
these people kept coming into my room
ro congratulate her," Bokat recalls,
laughing. "I didn't know them. I'd just
given birth. I was an morphine."
So what did her mother think of her
fictional debut? "She was insulted.
"She said, 'You didn't put your
brother in the book.' I said, 'Mom, it's
fiction.' She said, 'I just hope your in-
laws never see it.'"
In the book, Eve's in-laws think the
Susan Shapiro, a former resident of
West Bloomfield, is a New York City-
based freelance writer.
meaning of being good Jews is
"pulling out the electric menorah once
a year and cleaning your mink for the
High Holidays." Eve's mother-in-law,
Norma, is described as looking like a
cross between "Morticia" from The
Addams Family and Jo Anne Worley
from Laugh. In.
Bokat, whose family name was origi-
nally- "Bakatursky," grew up the oldest of
three children in a Reform
family in Great Neck, N.Y.
Like Eve's father, Bokat's
father (the late Peter Bokat)
was a psychiatrist.
Following in his footsteps,
her younger sister is a psy-
chiatric resident. Her
brother is a sportswriter.
Bokat was a good stu-
dent who remembers hid-
ing in her room, reading.
She always wanted to be a writer.
After majoring in English at Barnard,
she completed her master's degree and
doctorate at New York University in
1992. She admired such British and
Irish authors as Austen, Edna O'Brien
and Virginia Woolf, admitting she was
attracted to "the Protestant restraint,
the graceful and cerebral female char-
acters who were not victims."
Yet Bokat is also a fan of such
Jewish authors as Alice Hoffman and
Lynn Sharon Schwartz.
As in Austen's work, Bokat grapples
with struggles between the sexes and
classes. In Redeeming Eve, Eve pines for
her old boyfriend Graham, a rich WASP
professor who idolized the big Johns:
Updike and Cheever. Yet she winds up
falling for a sweet, poor Jewish photog-
rapher named Hart Goodman.
Donning a Yiddish accent, Hart jokes,
"I'm just a merchant-class Jew from the
wrong side of Delancey Street. You smar-
ty-pants Jews — with your big degrees
and fancy addresses — always making us
feel like real Yids." By marrying Hart,
Eve winds up coming to terms with
her roots.
Bokat admits that, in real life, she once
dated a rich WASP professor who idolized
Updike and Cheever. Twelve years ago she
married the sweet and Jewish Jay Lindell,
a communications executive. They live,
with their sons, 10-year-old Noah and 6-
year-old Spencer, in Monclair, N.J.
Juggling work, marriage and mother-