Paradise Cove
George T. Nagel
Manhattan Book Group (2026)
ISBN: 978-1968485511
Reviewed by Rob Laymon for Reader Views (11/2025)
The story of the Rebbe Yechezkel Taub would make an excellent film—one for some director skilled with unlikely tales. It is roughly this:
In the 1920s, Taub shepherded a group of Jews from their homeland in Poland to a settlement near Haifa in pre-state Israel. They intended to farm, but conditions pushed back. The land proved poor for farming, and the former owners refused to leave it and sometimes sabotaged their work. The money for the venture ran out, as money often does.
Taub came to America in 1938 looking for funding and then became stuck here when the Nazis invaded Poland. Many of his flock back home disappeared into the camps.
Once situated in America, Taub became someone else. Away went the Hasidic locks, shawl, and yarmulke. In their place emerged a successful businessman named George Nagel. Later, at the age of 80, he earned a BA in psychology from what was then San Fernando Valley State College, and is now California State University, Northridge.
We haven’t even gotten to the book yet.
While working toward his master’s degree, instead of taking classes and exams, Nagel proposed volunteering in a group home called Paradise Cove, and submitting day-by-day accounts of his experiences there. His adviser, Dr. Helen Giedt, agreed.
Paradise Cove: They Escaped the Cuckoo’s Nest by George T. Nagel is that account. Over about two years in the mid-1970s, Nagel wrote 108 letters to Dr. Giedt—unpolished, acute, and sympathetic—capturing the lives and struggles of those at the home. The book would have been his master’s thesis, had Nagel not returned to Israel in his mid-80s and become rebbe Yechezkel Taub again. You read that right.
And so we have here what amounts to the diary-like, epistolary account of an 80-year-old volunteer working in a group home among the mentally ill. Residents’ names show up in the pages, some frequently, some infrequently, trailing behind them the difficult baggage of their illnesses.
They engage Nagel in the coffee room and at the dinner table. They ask him for rides and favors. They call him every morning at 8 a.m. Through it all, Nagel remains steadfast, loyal, resilient, and, as he stresses, living his life in accordance with the highest traditions of Judaism, though he is not officially a holy man anymore.
Nagel’s style is simple, happy—the sort of thing you would write to a friend as a daily account of your work. His writing reveals a self-aware man, wise in knowing what he can help and what he can’t. He doesn’t spend much time on introductions—either to himself or most of the residents he encounters. As an octogenarian, he is not to be moved by much of the fervor of the outside world.
Many of his comments allude to biblical stories and Jewish proverbs, all very well explicated by editor Rabbi Pini Dunner, who is one of the stars of this story. It was Dunner who dug the book out of obscurity, researched it, edited it, and annotated the occasional esoteric reference.
Dunner’s footnotes indeed provide almost a micro education in Jewish tradition and belief, and make an important part of Paradise Cove. Credit is due to him.
So, what we are left with is the warm story of a man doing as decently as he can by his fellow human beings while the rest of the world goes crazy. It’s a lesson never out of date.