In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (69 page)

Harvey Jacobs,
Summer on a Mountain of Spices
(New York: Harper & Row, 1975)

Jacobs’s aunts and uncles ran a small hotel that was the model for the Willow Spring of this book. He provides an all-around slice of hotel life in a particularly humorous fashion. The novel is a coming of age piece, and by definition must be full of sex for the lead character, Harry Craft, and many others. A gangster stashes his very attractive girlfriend at the hotel while he is on the run from other mobsters, adding to the sexual excitement. Jacobs deals well with the antipathy between hotel and bungalow colony, including a softball game after which the hotel people defend their lake from the colony dwellers’ potential postgame refreshment. This book provides exceptional glimpses into the minds of the hotel owners. Jacobs describes the owner’s fascination with building a modern casino (the Catskills casino was a social hall, not a gambling venue), and also a variety of the entertainment that went on there. He treats us to the antics of the emcee and the show he introduces, a song-and-dance team, followed by a magician. It is a very realistic account of small hotel entertainment. Jacobs finishes with a touching return visit, years later, by protagonist Harry Craft.

Terry Kay,
Shadow Song
(New York: Washington Square Books, 1994)

Kay writes beautifully about love, friendship, memory, and returning in this novel that takes place in Pine Hill, in the Fleischmanns area of the northern Catskills. Bobo Murphy, a southern Gentile, works a few summers in a Jewish resort, having found the job through his brother, a local minister. Bobo forms what will become a lifelong relationship with the quirky old Avrum Feldman, and experiences an unrequited love with Amy Lourie, whose parents oppose intermarriage. Many years later, Bobo returns to the Catskills when Avrum dies and arranges Avrum’s very untraditional Kaddish, to the consternation of the local rabbi. The trip also brings him back to Amy, and this produces a startling life change. Kay’s descriptions of the physical beauty of the Catskills are a delight, and his storytelling is masterful. While the romance element is not autobiographical, Kay got the idea for the book because he indeed was a Georgia youth who worked in the Catskills.
Shadow Song
is a luminous book, full of joy, love, respect, and a warm commemoration of personal history. As in Kay’s other writings, there is a strong spirituality as well. As a novel about the Catskills,
Shadow Song
presents a perspective and coloration unlike those of any other novel.

Elinor Lipman,
The Inn at Lake Devine
(New York: Random House, 1998)

Lipman links the culture of two amazingly different resorts—the large Jewish Halseeyon in the Catskills (based on Kutsher’s) and the small anti-Semitic Inn at Lake Devine in Vermont. Natalie Marx, incensed at the family’s 1962 exclusion from the Inn at Lake Devine, plans revenge. But it is tempered by a later visit when she accompanies Robin, a Gentile summer camp friend, and her family, who just happen to be long-time vacationers at the Inn. Robin is later engaged to one son of the Inn’s owners, but dies in a car crash on the way to her wedding at the Inn. Natalie, then a newly graduated chef, stays and helps cook for and tend the mourners, cementing her attachment to the Vermont hotel. By the book’s end, Natalie has married the other son, with whom she fell in love when they formed part of a group visiting the Catskills. The two hotels develop other interesting connections as well. Elinor Lipman tackles some thorny issues like anti-Semitism and 1970s intermarriage with complexity, comedy, and tragedy.

Sidney Offit,
He Had It Made
(1959; reprint, Beckham Publications, Box 4066, Silver Spring, MD 20914; 301–384–7995, 1999)

Although set in the fictional Sesame Hotel,
He Had It Made
was based on the real Aladdin in Woodbourne, where author Sidney Offit worked as the steward in addition to renting rooms to guests. He married the owner’s daughter, but protagonist Al Brodie’s romances, which dominate the book, are not autobiographical. Offit provides a vivid description of the kitchen and dining room staff as well as the tension between bosses and workers, the competition among waiters, and the struggle between the chef and the maitre d.’ Al Brodie begins as a conniving and opportunistic person, talking himself into a job even though the dining room has a full staff already. Brodie goes through romances with a counselor and the female maitre d’ before getting involved with the owner’s daughter, and finally undergoes a major character shift by the end of the book. The dialogue is snappy and funny, and no one has written a better portrayal of the waiter’s life.

Eileen Pollack,
Paradise, New York
(Phildelphia: Temple University Press, 1998)

Brought up in a Catskills hotel, Pollack’s, Eileen Pollack has captured the myriad experiences of the Mountains in a way that no other novelist has come close to. In the declining years of the Catskills, Pollack writes, “Fifty resorts had once decorated the branches of Paradise [based on Liberty]. Now they clung to the back roads like cracked, fading baubles,” and she wants to preserve that old legacy. She takes on difficult themes, such as interracial romance and a guest’s death in the hotel. Pollack’s characters are richly drawn, and she makes us feel like we are sitting at the pool, hanging out in the kitchen, and setting tables with the waiters. The main character, Lucy, grows from a nine-year-old girl whose parents and grandparents own a small hotel, the Eden, to an adult who prevents a sale to the Hasidim and takes over the hotel, hoping to turn it into a living museum of Catskills life, with anthropologists on hand to interview the guests. Among the clientele during Lucy’s childhood are a group of communist guests paying a very low rate guaranteed by Lucy’s grandfather, who had once been in charge of a sweatshop where communists led a failed strike. Another low-rate group are Holocaust survivors, eligible for half price. Lucy’s friendship and later romance with the educated black handyman, Thomas Jefferson, pervade the book. Pollack describes well the contradiction hotelkeepers’ children faced between loyalty to preserving the tradition and the desire to get out of that hard life.

Mel Senator,
Catskill Summers
(Philadelphia: XLibris, 2000)

Mel Senator’s fiction is very firmly based on the real events of his fifteen years at a kuchalayn in Ferndale in the 1940s and 1950s, aided by interviews he recently conducted with family and friends. “Summer Farm,” with its eight bungalows and twenty-three kuchalayn rooms, continued to operate as a farming enterprise, and Senator gives us a valuable look at how residents’ children often helped with farm chores, including a whole chapter on the “garbage run” to the colony’s own dump. There is a nice chapter on the significance of softball games played between colonies. Senator’s uncle knew local hotel guards, and this permitted the extended family to sneak in. But other people invented all sorts of methods and competed for the most successful trespasses, which Senator describes in fine detail. He explores another aspect of life untouched by most writers—the Chalutzen (Young Pioneer) camps where youth trained for
aliyah
to Israel. The Catskills were an important location for this, and Summer Farm opens its property to such a group with no real estate of its own.

Art Spiegelman,
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale—II: And Here My Troubles Began
(New York: Pantheon, 1986)

A significant part of the second book in Art Spiegelman’s
Maus
series takes place in the Catskills. It is an appropriate selection for this annotated bibliography for two reasons. One, Spiegelman’s father uses the Catskills as a place to recount his concentration camp experiences to his son, Art. Two, the Catskills were indeed a haven for Holocaust survivors right after the war. Art Spiegelman and his wife are vacationing in Vermont when his father Vladek calls from a Catskills bungalow because his girlfriend has left him. Art and Françoise join him at the Cosmopolitan Bungalows, from where Vladek often sneaks into the nearby Pines Hotel to play bingo. It seems fitting that in this area a survivor can talk freely about horrors that are otherwise hard to share.

Reuben Wallenrod,
Dusk in the Catskills
(New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1957)

Reuben Wallenrod was a well-known scholar of Hebrew literature who was also a novelist. Originally written in Hebrew as
Ki Fanah Yom
, and unfortunately not so widely known, this book is a tender portrait of the life at Leo and Lillian Halper’s small hotel over the course of the season. Wallenrod captures the feel of a small hotel that started as a little family farm where relatives just came for a while but blossomed into a larger enterprise than the proprietors expected or wanted. Wallenrod offers a valuable glimpse of the largely home-grown entertainment and the Yiddish literary life of hotels of this era. The book ends sadly with the death in a car accident of Leo Halper’s dear friend, Morris Toozin. Unlike the way that Catskills hotels typically detached themselves from the occasional death of a guest, Halper brings the body to the hotel, where the funeral is held. Toozin’s death parallels what Wallenrod saw as the imminent demise of the Catskills (though it would thrive for two more decades), which indeed is conveyed in the very title. Halper narrowly escapes foreclosure by the bank, but the book is shaped by its epigraph from Jeremiah: “Woe unto us! For the day declineth. For the shadows of the evening are stretched out.” Toozin’s death also parallels the deaths of the Holocaust, which permeates the book. Leo constantly ruminates over the terrible contradiction of Jews enjoying themselves in the Catskills in 1943 while their fellow Jews are massacred in Europe. Anti-Semitism in the Catskills is also dealt with. Reuben Wallenrod got his inspiration for the book from the six to eight years he spent as guest and writer-in-residence at the intellectually oriented Rosenblatt’s Hotel in Glen Wild, where he was good friends with the owner. Wallenrod had deep ties to the land, which enabled him to fictionally portray Rosenblatt’s initial efforts at farming and his disappointment at turning his place into a hotel.

Herman Wouk,
Marjorie Morningstar
(New York: Little, Brown, 1955)

Wouk’s book, made into a popular film starring Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly, whose theme song “A Very Special Love” was a hit parade song in its day, touches on both romance and the problems of assimilation. Wouk’s fictional South Wind Camp shares its name with a real hotel in Woodbourne, still standing. But Wouk himself claims his inspiration was an adult camp in the Adirondacks, though his novel is set in the Catskills. Marjorie Morningstar is the assimilationist name taken by Marjorie Morganstern, whose romance with the highly assimilated Noel Airman (originally Ehrman) frames the book. Working as a counselor at a girls’ camp across the lake from the sexually infamous adult camp, South Wind, Marjorie rows to the other side where she meets Noel, the social director who puts on Broadway-type shows reminiscent of those Moss Hart wrote about in his autobiographical
Act One
. Wouk’s description of this entertainment is very nicely done. 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, but he tolerates her affair with Noel. Noel ultimately cannot conceive of Marjorie or any other woman as wanting more than a domestic, suburban life that he finds unimportant.

Short Stories

Hortense Calisher’s “Old Stock” is unique in telling the story of a Jewish family at a Gentile-owned boarding house that now has Jewish clientele. As German Jews who have recently had a financial downturn, this family is displeased at staying with Eastern European Jews. That conflict was significant throughout American life, and clearly in the Catskills, where German Jews typically stayed in a different area, around Fleischmanns. Calisher’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, Hester Elkin, and her mother visit a nearby woman they have come to know, but are surprised to hear this woman of Dutch heritage make an anti-Semitic remark, apparently unaware of her guests’ background. That anti-Semitism casts a shadow on Hester’s vacation, as she keeps expecting it to surface in others at the boarding house.

Eileen Pollack’s
The Rabbi in the Attic
(New York: Delphinium Books, 1992) features a title piece that is a comic novella about a small orthodox congregation in the Catskills that fires its ultraobservant rabbi, only to find that he refuses to leave the house that came with his job. The congregation has mistreated so many rabbis that the seminary will not send a replacement; the only rabbi the shul’s trustees can find is a zealous Reform woman who nearly flunked out of school and can’t sing worth beans. If she wants the position, the trustees inform her, she must find a way to evict her predecessor from his house. Another story describes the invasion of Bethel by hordes of hippies during the Woodstock summer of 1969; two other stories involve characters who work at an insurance company that insures various hotels, bungalow colonies, and camps in the Catskills.

In Abraham Raisin’s “Two Working-Girls” (in Henry Goodman, ed.,
The New Country: Stories from the Yiddish About Life in America
[New York: YUKF Publishers, 1961]), the narrator, only four months in America, sits at a boarding house table across from two twenty-three-year-old assimilated women garment workers. He dislikes their American style of dress, hair, and flirtation, and resents their failure to speak any Yiddish though, as he knows, they come from a Yiddish-speaking home. At the same time, he is attracted to them and their Americanized ways. They dislike him for being a greenhorn. Over the two-week stay, they all soften to each other: the young women begin to speak Yiddish, and he comes to understand their need for a reprieve from their hard labor in the garment industry and the oppressive heat of the city, where people are collapsing. In the end, he is the only one of the guests to see them off at the train.