It's Expensive to be Rich 'Darlings' but Costly To Be Poor - A Book Review: The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman

Learning It's expensive to be rich, but costly to be poor, petite little Malka Trevowsky, a Russian Jewish immigrant, rises to become America's favorite Italian Catholic Mother and TV personality, the quintessential queen of ice cream, Lillian Dunkle.

Too young to work, Malka's unhappy Mother, shuts six year old Malka and her Sister Flora out of their one room tenement every morning telling them not to return until they have money. Soon, Malka's n'er do well Father abandons the family of six. Searching for him, Malka steps off a street corner, and the greatest opportunity of her life, through tragedy, emerges.

A born businesswoman, exhibiting all the strong personality traits of an entrepreneur, Malka methodically plods along, working to be the first with the most of the best, in the cut throat ice cream industry. She utilizes her frugal, creative resourcefulness learned in childhood to build her ice cream empire, one penny, one paper cone, and one 3.5 ounce ice cream scoop at a time.

Told from the elderly voice of Mrs. Lillian Dunkle, Susan Jane Gilman's fictional novel reads like an historic biography. Her detailed portrayal of tragic, despondent family members and chaotic family life inside the diseased, dirty, segregated tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City during the early 1900's, is not a typical portrayal.

Late in life, Lillian Dunkle's large ego, which ironically makes her successful, skews her sense of reality and she lands in serious trouble with the law. Yet, as compared with her childhood, the prospect of prison with one's own bed and three squares a day, seems like a piece of cake with ice cream!

Read my review in the June Issue of Real Simple Magazine, p. 28 and enjoy!!