Shulman aside, you could find one-line descriptions of Goodman's main characters in any half-dozen American-Jewish  the rabbi with two sons, one brilliant and prodigal, one duller but more loyal; the Holocaust survivor numbed by his past; the daughters tempted by the twin heresies of feminism and Zionism (Israel is viewed as a nation of faithless sinners by these ultra-Orthodox Jews); the assimilationist Jew who comes to a bad end.
The assimilationist Jew was met with a bad end.