In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (47 page)

(
repeat last chorus
)

Shoot the Shtrudel to Me, Yudel! (1941)

Words and music by Henry Foner

Dedicated to Yudel Slutsky
of Arrowhead Lodge, Ellenville, NY

Verse:

Chorus:

Interlude:

(repeat chorus)

Part 5

R
OMANCE

Sha-Wan-Ga Lodge, High View. Sha-Wan-Ga Lodge had such a reputation as a singles place that many Mountains people called it “Shwenga” Lodge, Yiddish for “pregnant.”
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ATSKILLS
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NSTITUTE

Postcard from Delmar Hotel, Loch Sheldrake. Although this was a small, family-oriented hotel, it shared the common Catskills postcard feature of attractive young people meeting at the pool.
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ATSKILLS
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Postcard of lobby lounge at Laurels Country Club, Sackett Lake. The Laurels was another hotel known as a singles spot. This boat-shaped bar was very glitzy, even for the Catskills.
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ATSKILLS
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I
NTRODUCTION

T
he Catskills were great for romance, since they provided more freedom than Jews usually had in their tightknit communities back home in New York. Some resorts catered to singles looking to meet others. Hotels and bungalow colonies where husbands only joined their wives on weekends provided the potential for midweek romance. And young staff members could meet other staff or guests for romantic liaisons. It is no surprise that sex has figured prominently in all the fiction that is centered in the Mountains.

From Abraham Cahan’s
The Rise of David Levinsky
comes “Miss Tevkin,” about the first glimpses of a romantic attachment during Levinksy’s brief visit to the Rigi Kulm House in the Fleischmanns area of the northern Catskills. There, Cahan writes, “the air was redolent of grass, flowers, ozone, and sex.” For people looking to meet a potential spouse, the Catskills was prime territory, as we see in Cahan’s depiction of the singles. The “bewitching azure of the sky and the divine taste of the air seemed to bear out a feeling that it was exempt from any law of nature with which I was familiar,” showing how romance could blossom in such a special location. Even though Levinsky is supposed to be en route to his fiancée, he attracts the attention of young women at the hotel, and he winds up involved with Miss Tevkin.

We return to Harvey Jacobs’s
Summer on a Mountain of Spices
for the next selection, “Forbidden Fruit.” Jacobs’s novel is a coming-of-age piece, and by definition must be full of sex for lead character Harry Craft and many others, including the beautiful mistress stashed in the hotel for the summer by a gangster on the run from competition. In this selection, young Marvin Katz winds up a surrogate partner for counselor Essie Poritz, whose fiancé Burton Zomkin is fighting in Europe.

“Marjorie at South Wind” is excerpted from Herman Wouk’s
Marjorie Morningstar
. This novel, made into a popular film starring Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly, centers on the romance between Marjorie Morningstar (the assimilationist name taken by Marjorie Morganstern) and Noel Airman (originally Ehrman). Working as a counselor at a girl’s camp across the lake from the sexually infamous adult camp, South Wind, Marjorie rows over and meets Noel, the social director who puts on Broadway-type shows reminiscent of the ones Moss Hart wrote about in the previous section. The next year Marjorie returns as a staff member at South Wind itself, despite her mother’s fears that she will lose her virginity. Indeed, Marjorie’s parents send her uncle along to work as a dishwasher, in the hope that he will protect her, but he tolerates her affair with Noel. Noel ultimately cannot conceive of Marjorie or of any other woman as wanting more than a domestic, suburban life, which he finds unimportant.

Terry Kay’s novel
Shadow Song
, from which “Amy Lourie” is taken, is unique in that it was written by a Gentile from Georgia who worked two summers in the northern Catskills. The protagonist, Bobo Murphy, is waiting tables at a hotel when he falls in love with a Jewish girl, Amy Lourie, whose family is staying there. Her parents prohibit the relationship. After his few years working at the hotel, Bobo returns every year to visit an eccentric Jewish man he befriended, Avrum, while the lifelong unrequited love stays in the background. Many years later, Bobo returns to the Catskills when Avrum dies and arranges his very untraditional Kaddish, to the consternation of the local rabbi. In the part included here, we see Bobo in the old hotel where others are having affairs, and the action is interwoven with his memories of how he first met Amy and learned of the strikes against their potential relationship.

Miss Tevkin

Abraham Cahan

O
n a Saturday morning in August I took a train for Tannersville, Catskill Mountains, where the Kaplan family had a cottage. I was to stay with them over Sunday. I had been expected to be there the day before, but had been detained, August being part of our busiest season. While in the smoking-car it came over me that from Kaplan’s point of view my journey was a flagrant violation of the Sabbath and that it was sure to make things awkward. Whether my riding on Saturday would actually offend his religious sensibilities or not (for in America one gets used to seeing such sins committed even by the faithful), it was certain to offend his sense of the respect I owed him. And so, to avoid a sullen reception I decided to stop overnight in another Catskill town and not to make my appearance at Tannersville until the following day.