In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (38 page)

At sixteen I moved up from busboy to waiter. My busboy was older and much bigger than me, and at first it was a bit awkward. But I knew the routine pretty well and was able to give the guests a sense of confidence in me. I remembered the special details about each guest’s preferences, and I delivered the food pleasantly and promptly. Once I got into Harvard, the guests would often volunteer that they had a granddaughter for me. I learned many important life lessons in the dining room.

These are lessons that have guided me through the years.

Living at a hotel meant learning many useful skills, such as hanging wallpaper and fixing toilets (my college classmates were amazed on more than one occasion at this talent). I learned to skip pebbles on the water of the pool, practicing with a ready supply of chlorine tablets. But there were chores that I dreaded. We would put up newspaper on the windows in the winter to keep the sun from fading the rooms. In the spring one of the first tasks was taking down the paper and dusting the windowsills (vacuuming if necessary). In addition to the accumulation of dead flies, we would occasionally encounter a hornet’s nest. This prospect would fill me with dread, and I did my best to persuade my brother to take the lead on this.

Having a hotel in the family seemed perfectly normal to me—many of my friends had their own. Marc Stier’s family ran Stier’s hotel, Eileen Pollack’s family ran Pollack’s, Stanley Lipkowitz’s family ran Lipkowitz’s Bungalows. The only difference was that our hotel no longer bore the family name. In the late 1940s my parents decided that the Jacob Inn was no longer a fitting title, and they came up with Delmar as their Americanized replacement. A few friends grew up on chicken farms, but these were in decline even before the hotels faded from the scene.

W
HO
K
ILLED THE
C
ATSKILLS
? A
GING AND
A
MERICANIZATION

As a sociologist I wonder, “What happened to the Catskills? How could it unravel so quickly and so completely?” Sociologists often discuss the way one generation passes its culture, values, and rituals to the next generation through a process called socialization. I have never placed as much stock in socialization as some of my colleagues, and perhaps the Catskills experience explains why. In the course of three generations, Catskills culture was born, flourished, and vanished. So much for the standard socialization story.

Most of the Jewish academics I know want to study the world; they don’t feel any special need to devote their academic careers to studying the Jewish experience. African American social scientists continue to feel an obligation to study the oppression of their people, as do many Hispanic and Native American scholars. Perhaps we Jewish academics have unduly neglected our own experiences. For the untimely demise of the Catskills is a perfect sociological “whodunit,” no less deserving of serious scholarly analysis than the mating rituals of the Canela (a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon) or the earnings patterns of Asian American engineers, topics that some of my graduate students have found perfectly irresistible.

Surely the success of Jewish immigrants to America is an important part of the explanation. Large numbers of Jews moved out of the hot tenements of New York City to the surrounding suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. Air conditioning made summers more tolerable, so escaping the city for the mountains became less of an imperative. The decline of anti-Semitism also played a role. The blatant refusal to accept Jews as guests in many resorts, which gave rise to the Jewish Catskills, has dissipated. Today we can take it for granted that no Sheraton, Marriott, or Hyatt will refuse a reservation from someone because their last name is Cohen or Goldstein or Scheinbaum. As Jews became more affluent, they sought a broader range of vacation experiences than the Catskills could provide. At the same time, the children of the hotel owners went off to Ivy League colleges and were no longer interested in running the family business. Marc Stier attended Wesleyan on his way to a Ph.D. in political theory, Eileen Pollack went to Yale and landed a faculty position in English at the University of Michigan, and Stanley Lipkowitz went to Cornell before earning his M.D. and Ph.D.

But the immigrant success story is not enough. Other groups have been successful and have maintained more identifiable ethnic enclaves. Chinese Americans come to mind as a comparison group. In recent years, Chinese Americans have achieved tremendous social and economic success, attending elite colleges and entering the mainstream professions. Both Jews and Chinese intermarry with white, Anglo-Saxon Americans at remarkable rates. But many major cities still have a Chinatown. Why have the Chinese succeeded in maintaining this nexus of ethnic institutions while the Jews were unable to keep the Catskills in business?

The answer I have come to believe is that my parent’s generation (but not my parents in particular) put the first nail in the coffin by starting a rapid exodus from the boisterous hotels and bungalow colonies. By the early sixties, success and the Americanization of the Jews of New York had put the Catskills in mortal jeopardy. As families stopped coming for the summer, the Catskills experience no longer evolved to conform to what were becoming increasingly American tastes. The hotels continued to adapt, but in response to the changing needs of an aging clientele. As youth culture began to take hold in the late 1960s, the gap between the experiences and outlook of my generation and the vacation experience offered at Catskills resorts had become a deep chasm. I don’t know from personal experience why families stopped coming—that was happening offstage, from my perspective. What I do know was that the aging of the guests made the demise of the hotels much more likely, because they came to represent a vacation experience that was increasingly removed from what younger, more Americanized Jews would seek out.

In other words, affluence, suburbanization, and expanding vacation opportunities explain some of the decline in the popularity of the Catskills, but they are not enough to explain why interest in this type of resort experience completely evaporated. I am suggesting that a tipping process changed the basic character of the resorts. Tipping is a concept familiar to sociologists who study residential segregation. An example: once a neighborhood becomes predominantly black—reaches the tipping point—whites generally avoid buying new homes there and the public definition of the neighborhood changes. I am suggesting that aging guests played a similar role in defining the character of a resort. Once hotels and bungalow colonies were predominantly oriented to elderly customers, families with children began to seek other vacation destinations. This explains the fact that the change from family resort to retirement resort took place so quickly and so completely.

At the Delmar, the timing of this transition is quite easy to pinpoint. When I was five years old, in 1960, the Delmar was very much a family resort. The children’s dining room was packed with forty or more children. The day camp employed as many as four full-time counselors, and the vast caches of arts and crafts supplies my parents bought never seemed to last into August. Husbands would often join their wives and children on Friday evening, and the kitchen was prepared for a number of late arrivals. The day camp closed in 1965, when I was ten, and the candy store two years later. The hotel remained open for twenty more years, but in retrospect the fate of the Jewish resorts was sealed the year the camp was converted into a storage room.

The Catskills melted away from the bottom up. The bungalow colonies were the first to go, then the smaller hotels, with some of the largest and fanciest hotels hanging on the longest. The Concord just closed, lasting nearly a decade longer than Grossinger’s. The larger hotels were able to offer amenities that enabled them to maintain a mixed clientele longer.

By the time I was a teenager, the guests were largely retired—much older than my parents. We would discuss how to attract a younger clientele—would a tennis court help? A putting green? Or maybe a shuttle van to the golf course? Of course many of these ideas were impractical, too expensive; and in the end they might have delayed but would not have reversed the inexorable exodus of families from the Catskills.

My parents wanted a “middle-aged” clientele, but their definition of “middle-aged” was forced to change as the guests grew older. At one point, our working definition meant someone who was still able to use the shuffleboard court; then it was someone able to walk to the court, then someone able to see it from the dining room window, then someone able to remember what shuffleboard was, then …

This division by age may seem peculiar, even unkind, but remember that this was just the moment when youth culture was coalescing, with demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the emergence of the generation gap. We didn’t subscribe to Mario Savio’s dictum, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” but we knew just what he meant. It was a time of moonwalks. Reminiscing about the
shtetl
would have to wait.

The Catskills were in the hospice by the time I was in college. By then an age gulf separated me from the allure of the Catskills. For me,
Yiddishkeit
was more about the trials and tribulations of the geriatric set than it was about my own heritage. The aging clientele chose prunes over lox and eggs, and
Fiddler on the Roof
over the samba. By the time I graduated from college, the Catskills were literally dying of neglect. I was too busy writing my dissertation to go to the funeral. The transformation of the character of the Catskills from a vibrant center of family life to a quiet vacation locale for retired Jews can be traced through entertainment and food, two of the hallmarks of the Catskills experience.

S
HOWTIME IN THE
C
ASINO AND THE
G
ENERATIONAL
D
IVIDE

The aging of the guests revealed itself first in the entertainment. Every night there was something: movie night, bingo night, talent night, and shows four times a week. This separated the small hotel from the bungalow colony, which often had just a weekly show on Saturday night.

At the Delmar we would have three singers for every comic, because singers were lower risk. Most were good enough to help the crowd pass an enjoyable evening, but many comics bombed miserably—the element of surprise had long since gone out of the same old jokes. And it was usually a bad idea to have more than one hypnotist per summer.

The music at the hotel was a mix of Broadway show tunes and old Yiddish songs. My dad liked to play Broadway scores on the hotel’s loudspeaker—
Pal Joey, Guys and Dolls, Camelot
. When it was still a family resort, the music was contemporary, popular music, with some older Yiddish favorites mixed in. Of course the most popular was the score from
Fiddler on the Roof
, with its beautiful songs that evoked the shtetl. Most of the singers felt they needed to include one or more songs from
Fiddler
in their song set.

I can still map out a typical singer’s set: an upbeat welcome song or two followed by a few Broadway show tunes. Then a sentimental turn toward Yiddish classics, perhaps “
Shein vi di L’vone
” “
Belz
,” or “
Tsena, Tsena
.” Some of the more athletic singers would dance the kazatska while singing the lively “Rumania, Rumania.” A singer aiming straight at the guests’ heartstrings could add some of the more sentimental Yiddish favorites, like “My Yiddishe Mama,” or songs directed at Jewish identity itself—“Tell Me Where I Should Go” or “
Hatikva
,” the Israeli national anthem. A few songs, like “
Bei Mir Bistu Shen
,” were sung half in English and half in Yiddish, since by the 1960s Yiddish competence was disappearing among the younger parents and certainly among the children.

Running the candy store meant going to the show every night. And two years of singers, comedians, magicians, and hypnotists surely constituted an overdose. How much
Rozhinkes mit Mandlen
could you take? By the late 1960s I was thoroughly sick of
Fiddler on the Roof
. I had heard every song a few hundred times too often.
Dayenu!

But who could forget the high drama of talent night? Countless skits were performed by the guests and staff, making gentle fun of the Catskills experience, and often involving elaborate productions of Broadway show tunes with modified lyrics. And talent night could turn into a pitched battle. One former cantor once tried to sing all of the verses to some interminable Yiddish song. People begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He was on a mission to preserve Yiddish songs, while the audience just wanted to have a good time.

Many original numbers were composed for talent night. These typically took the form of new lyrics for familiar show tunes. One that sticks in my mind is “Delmar Time,” sung to the tune of “Summertime.” The chorus went like this: