In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (4 page)

When my mother died, I found among her few papers a postcard of the hotel, the only memento apart from a few photos. I knew that somehow I would discover what I expected to be the remnants of Brown’s Hotel Royal. The postcard would be my magic key and treasure map, even if I only located foundation stones. But I was shocked to see an operating hotel, the Bradstan, that was so clearly the Royal. It lacked the symmetrical side rooms that had once framed the front porch, a common Catskills architectural detail (they had been torn down due to deterioration). And its white clapboards were not the old stucco facade. But the whole shape was there, comfortably nestled on Route 17-B across from the most beautiful lake in the Mountains.

Each year since 1993 I have visited the hotel for one reason or another. One year I brought a
New York Times
reporter who wrote a story on me and the History of the Catskills Conference. Another year I came to collect an old menu, handwritten by my mother in 1950, that owners Ed Samuelson and Scott Dudek had turned up. Once I brought my wife and children to see the place where I lived as a baby and toddler. A year after that I went to pick up a box of old dishes from the hotel’s past. I kept thinking, “I should stay here as a guest once.” So I did!

Who slept in this room fifty years ago? Actually, the question is who slept in each half of this room, for two small rooms had since been made into a single larger one. Was it one of my aunts, uncles, cousins—the many family members who often stayed and/or worked here? Max, Laura, Gloria, Bess, Nat, Gene, Eugene, Sylvia, Sylvia, and Sylvia (so common a name then)—did you fall asleep here, across from White Lake shimmering in the August moonlight? Did you enjoy summer here in the Catskills, swim in the lake, play poker at night, hear my cousin Gene play violin, drink schnapps?

I would have been conceived here at the Royal if my parents were already up here April 1, getting ready for Passover. But they did not open for Passover, the place being so small.

The one story I remember my parents telling many times concerned me as a toddler, roaming through the dining room. Fearful I’d crack my head on a table corner, my father ran in front of me, covering the corners with his hand. It’s a simple tale of a protective father, but it happened here, downstairs in our family’s hotel.

What a strange idea, my parents amid these many hundreds of very ordinary people thinking they could run simple hotels in the Catskills. Not much business experience, precious little capital, and a reliance on relatives, friends, and
landsmen
(coresidents of one’s European hometown) who would accept shared baths and cramped rooms. But despite the precarious finances and difficult labor, these New York Jews had a tender feeling that they could come up here and make a summer celebration of their interconnected lives in the fresh Catskills air. That was it—same story everywhere—lots of Morrises, Sylvias, Abes, and Mollies. They weren’t the fancy dressers of The Nevele or Grossinger’s, just plain Jewish folk who had great fun and a good time on the cheap.

Now I come back to roam country roads in search of abandoned hotels to film as a record for people, both veterans of the Catskills and many younger people who will never quite understand how a million vacationers each summer came to relax in hotels and bungalow colonies, or how their present doctors and professors worked each summer to be their culture’s first generation of college students.

My camera records dybbuks grazing in the fallen timbers of old kitchens, hotel spirits lurking in the half-moon facades of “Catskills mission” architecture. My tape recorder picks up from overgrown weeds the murmurs of requests for pickled lox, embraces in the staff quarters, cha-chas from champagne night in the casino. My heart logs a million desires, hopes, and dramas of every sort of East Coast Jew looking for people and a place to make a life with.

My hope is that within the next ten years, every Jewish fiction writer worth his or her kosher salt will have written, or will be in the process of writing, a book, novella, or story based on the Catskills. A previous generation of these Lit-vak literati and Galitzianer storytellers found the Lower East Side to be central to Jewish storytelling, much as the English romantic poets feasted on swans and vales. But that was the generation leaving the East Side. The current generation just left the Catskills and can’t find the Mountains anymore. If more writers can capture this summer Eden in literature, it won’t be only about sleeping in my parents’ old hotel, but about a whole culture of greenhorns and “all-rightniks” who learned to play and enjoy life in White Lake, Monticello, Loch Sheldrake, Woodridge, Fallsburg, Woodbourne, and Greenfield Park.

To situate the sociology and history of the Jewish experience in the Catskills, I want to highlight some of the themes that run through this book: the adaptation to American culture while preserving Jewishness, the sense of community in the hotels and bungalow colonies, and the significance of the Catskills legacy for current culture.

In the Catskills, Jews could become Americanized while preserving much of their Jewishness. The resort area was the vacationland and workplace of Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, starting at the turn of the twentieth century and continuing through the turn of the twenty-first, though it is now only a shell of its onetime glory. Jews could have a proper vacation like regular Americans, but they could do it in Yiddish if they wished, and with kosher food, varying degrees of religious observance, and a vibrant Jewish culture of humor, theater, and song. Jewish-American humor grew up in the Catskills, where any Jewish comedian worth a laugh got his or her start. While Jewish music largely originated in Eastern Europe, its new variants were very much a Catskills product. The Jewish popular entertainment of New York, a Yiddish vaudeville style, shaped the night life of the Catskills and entered the mainstream rather than remaining isolated in the Lower East Side Jewish theaters.

Farms, boarding houses, kuchalayns, bungalow colonies, hotels, adult “camps,” and children’s camps housed people of all classes and occupations. While there was class stratification due to the range of costs in different resorts, even some of the more expensive places were nevertheless accessible, if only for a weekend. People in their teens and twenties came to work their way through college and professional or graduate school, making the Catskills a core element of Jewish upward mobility. From John Gerson’s first Jewish boarding house in the late 1890s, the Catskills beckoned people to come up for fresh air, recovery from illness, a place in the country, a
haimishe
vacation. The modest farmhouses and boarding houses eventually gave way to bungalow colonies ranging from five to more than 100 bungalows each, and to hotels holding from 20 to 2,000 people. There was always someplace for everyone, inexpensive or luxurious.

A sense of community pervaded the Catskills. The very vastness of the resort culture made this possible—people were involved in an individual community and were also part of a gigantic Catskillswide community. Like the
landsmanshaftn
that Jews created to provide friendship and security for their friends and kin from European
shtetls
and towns, these resorts were full of people sharing a common background. Smaller hotels frequently employed “solicitors” to recruit guests from their neighborhoods, and hotels acquired that local culture, which continued into the rest of the year. Guests returned year after year, and often generation after generation—a child in the day camp might later be a junior counselor, when older work as a busboy or waiter in the dining room, and in the near future return with a spouse and children. Guests developed loyalty to the hotel and its owners, based on family, friendship, and participation in a miniature society where relationships were amplified by proximity. Even in many of the larger hotels, owners reported knowing and greeting the majority of their guests prior to the expansion of the 1960s. But even without that personal connection to owners, the larger hotels had a small-town feeling. Many of the workers were closely bonded with each other, with the owners, and with long-standing guests. Staff shared that community for the whole summer, frequently working for years in the same resort, and many friendships lasted past the summer. Staff-guest romances also contributed to the continuing connections.

These hotels, colonies, and kuchalayns were not merely resorts but miniature societies, where people knew lots about each other and created intricate relationships in a neighborhood and family milieu. Further, the accumulation of these many small communities built a giant community extending through Ulster, Sullivan, very southern Greene, and the tiniest sliver of southeastern Delaware counties, a phenomenon unlike any other resort culture then or since. Much like in their home towns and neighborhoods, people would experience this larger community through frequent visits to delis and shops in nearby towns, constant walking down the road past numerous other resorts, and visiting friends and relatives in other hotels and bungalow colonies. Bungalow dwellers were always sneaking into hotel casinos for the shows, guest at small hotels were doing the same in larger hotels, and staff were perpetually visiting other hotels for romance. Through the small and large communities they built, the Jews created in the Catskills a cultural location that symbolized their transformation into Americans: their growth into the middle class, their ability to replace some anxiety with relaxation, their particular way of secularizing their religion while still preserving some religious attachments and ethnic identification.

At present, the Catskills appear quite different from even two or three decades ago. Literally hundreds of hotels have ceased to exist since the 1960s. Driving there today, Catskills veterans will find that Kutsher’s Country Club and The Raleigh look, feel, and taste familiar. So too do the Homowack and Aladdin, though both are now ultraorthodox, and the Aladdin no longer runs as a hotel. Smaller places like the South Wind in Woodbourne and the Rainbow Hotel in Ulster Heights will captivate you with their original look, untouched by even the renovations craze of the 1950s. Also bearing a faithful old-time look is the Grand Mountain in Greenfield Park, only recently refurbished after a long closure. The Nevele and Fallsview, now combined as the Nevele Grande, resemble the past less. The Hudson Valley Resort in Kerhonkson (formerly The Granit) and the Swan Lake Resort in Swan Lake (formerly Stevensville Lake Hotel) are far less familiar under their new owners. A tremendous number of bungalow colonies remain, many orthodox and Hasidic, though there are more secular ones than popular lore leads you to expect. Yoga ashrams, Zen meditation centers, drug rehab programs, and mental health and developmental disabilities facilities have taken over the shells of many old hotels. But the town streets, once crowded with guests, workers, and locals who serviced the resorts, are subdued, lined with many vacant storefronts. Recent hotel closings of the large Pines and the largest ever, The Concord, resonate widely. The small hotel Sunny Oaks, run by four generations of women in the Arenson family and home of the first five History of the Catskills Conferences, stopped operating in 2000, causing less dramatic but still noticeable changes in the landscape.

The promise of a renaissance of sorts looms—The Concord and Grossinger’s, both owned by the same developer, are scheduled to reopen in stages over the next five years. Kutsher’s has entered an arrangement with an Indian gambling casino that will greatly expand the hotel while the casino will open next door. No one, of course, expects a resurgence of resort building that would ever approximate the past, but the Catskills do remain a powerful memory and a draw. Many people have bought summer homes, including condos or co-ops developed out of old bungalow colonies and even out of the old Brown’s Hotel (now Grandview Palace). Orthodox Jews of many types continue to make the Catskills a distinctively Jewish location through their widespread network of bungalow colonies, camps, and yeshivas.

These changes prompt some questions: Why are such past forms of adaptation and community meaningful to people in the present? Why is it now important to revisit the Catskills legacy? Jews today have a deep longing to understand and relive their history in this country. This is much more than nostalgia, for it involves an attempt to grasp their place in American society, to figure out how far they have come, and to reaffirm the importance of family circles, friendship groups, neighborhood life, and organizational connections. In the last two decades, Jewish life has been reinvigorated with increasing religious and cultural expressions: Jewish studies grows as an academic enterprise; klezmer music enjoys tremendous popularity; Jewish genealogical interest thrives. In this current milieu, the past Catskills setting is central, since this is where Jews learned to vacation and enjoy themselves, found a source of mobility, nourished their culinary and comic culture, took small farms with few resources and built a complex civilization hosting a million people each summer by the 1950s and 1960s.