In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (70 page)

Thane Rosenbaum’s “Bingo by the Bungalow,” in
Elijah Visible
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) portrays the intimacy of daily bungalow colony life through Adam Posner’s growing up the child of Holocaust survivors. At Cohen’s Summer Cottages in Kiamesha Lake, Adam is the only child; his mother is a bingo addict, looking for the small
chotchkies
(knickknacks) from her own and adjoining colonies, and for the mammoth $200 Labor Day jackpot. The omnipresent doom and tragedy of the survivor shows up—Adam suffers a compound fracture learning to play baseball, and his father’s heart condition puts him in the hospital at the same time. The communal caretaking by the colony residents reminds us of this important element of bungalow life. As in many of Rosenbaum’s stories, the deliverance at the end just doesn’t come—we are still waiting for Elijah, for peace. And like others who have written Catskills fiction, Rosenbaum has his protagonist come back as a father, with his own boy, to scour the ruins of Cohen’s.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Yearning Heifer” (in his collection,
Passions
[New York: Farrar, Straus & Girous, 1970]) is an autobiographical tale of Singer’s foray to a Catskill farm for a quiet place to write. Rather than finding a family that is eager to take in boarders, Singer’s character encounters a surly farmer who is angry that his wife has placed an advertisement in the paper. Singer’s story gives us a picture of the primitive conditions in which an early twentieth-century farm family lived, the relations between Jewish and Gentile farmers, and a developing friendship between the boarder and his “farmers,” as boarding house and kuchalayn renters often referred to their proprietors, even if they were no longer actively engaged in farming.

Singer’s five-page “In the Mountains,” subtitled “A Fragment” (in Henry Goodman, ed.,
The New Country: Stories from the Yiddish About Life in America
[New York: YUKF Publishers, 1961]), is really just a little sketch. Singer shows Sholem Melnick and his teenage son Ben tending cows and chickens and struggling with plow horses to remove rocks on their Catskills farm. Sholem has become less observant in the New World, but even in the midst of his travails, the beauty of the area strengthens his devoutness as he thinks of God giving Moses the Torah at Mount Sinai.

Steve Stern’s
The Wedding Jester
(St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999) takes its title from this story, and won the National Jewish Book Award. A bride at the Concord Hotel is taken over by a dybbuk, the spirit of an unsuccessful Mountain comedian, and pandemonium results. An exorcism is required to stop the bride/dybbuk’s constant stream of dirty Borscht Belt jokes. Steve Stern’s Jewish magical realism style has led some critics to call him a modern-day version of Isaac Bashevis Singer. His writing pulsates with as much mysticism, magic, and
mishegos
. As he captures the many worlds of past, present, and future in one instant, Steve Stern makes us give up our assumptions about what is ordinary life.

N
ONFICTION

History and Social Science

Phil Brown,
Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998)

This is the most comprehensive history of the Jewish Catskills, written as a combination of sociology, history, and personal memoirs. Phil Brown grew up in the hotel that his parents owned from 1946 to 1952; after they went broke, they worked their whole lives there, up to 1980. Brown worked as well, from age thirteen all through college.
Catskill Culture
provides background on the farms, hotels, and bungalow colonies, and offers extensive insights into the lives of young workers in the dining room. It also includes material on religion and politics in the area. The book has some 100 graphics, providing a rich accompaniment of menus, rate cards, brochures, postcards, and photos.

John Conway,
Retrospect: An Anecdotal History of Sullivan County, New York
(Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1996)

John Conway, the official Sullivan County Historian, adapted this book of short essays from his series in the
Middletown Times Herald Record
. His book covers a broad sweep of Sullivan County history, in a very colloquial, personal tone. It contains a number of essays about the resorts and personalities of the Jewish Catskills. Conway includes much material on local businesses and politicians. There is a chapter on organized crime in the Catskills, a neglected subject.

Alf Evers,
The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972)

Alf Evers was the leading historian of the Catskills. His book goes back centuries, touching only briefly on the Jewish influx. Nevertheless, this background is important for understanding the milieu into which the Jews were entering. Evers wrote very engaging popular history that is both comprehensive and a pleasure to read.

Alf Evers,
In Catskill Country: Collected Essays on Mountain History, Life, and Lore
(Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1995)

Evers’s writings since the classic
The Catskills
; contains more useful material on the early history but less on the Jewish Catskills than his earlier book.

Alf Evers, Elizabeth Cromley, Betsy Blackmar, and Neil Harris, eds.,
Resorts of the Catskills
(New York: Architectural League of New York/St. Martin’s Press, 1979)

While some of the historical material in this collection is found elsewhere, the real value is the wonderful photographs by John Margolies. The Jewish Catskills are emphasized, but various Gentile resorts are also covered, all the way back to the grand hotels early in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Cromley’s essay provides valuable architectural history, and Betsy Blackmar contributes a useful social history of the resorts.

Myrna Frommer and Harvey Frommer,
It Happened in the Catskills: An Oral History in the Words of Busboys, Bellhops, Guests, Proprietors, Comedians, Agents, and Others Who Lived It
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991)

The Frommers interviewed a large number of people who owned hotels, worked in them, and stayed in them. Their book is a treasure trove of photos and other graphics, using excerpts from the interviews to provide a vivid account of the resort life. The book is particularly strong in covering the entertainers and the talent bookers, and also the professional athletes who worked, stayed, and did cameo appearances in the hotels. As well, a number of hotel owners provide inside accounts of their resorts.

David Gold, ed.,
The River and the Mountains: Readings in Sullivan County History
(Marielle Press, Attn: David Gold, 337 N. Ardmore Rd, Bexley, OH 43209. $20.00)

For the first time, readers interested in the whole sweep of Sullivan County history have in
The River and the Mountains
a single source to which they can turn. Beginning with the lifestyle of the Delaware Indians and ending with the recent troubles of the resorts, the book sheds light on some lesser-known aspects of Sullivan’s past and provides new insight into more familiar subjects as well. Editor David M. Gold has drawn on a wide range of fascinating materials, including letters, memoirs, and interviews, photographs and maps, and historical writing both popular and scholarly, to produce the most comprehensive treatment of Sullivan County’s history ever published. Readers interested in the Jewish history of the Catskills will particularly enjoy the chapters on Jewish farms and boarding houses in the early twentieth century, getting to the mountains, organized crime in the Catskills, and the resorts.

Book of Remembrance of the Hebrew Congregation of Loch Sheldrake

The Hebrew Congregation of Loch Sheldrake/Bes Hakeneset Ada Yisroel published this 169-page
Book of Remembrance
to honor the shul’s 75 years. Joseph Akselrad has done a wonderful job of putting together this volume. As a companion accomplishment, in June 1997 the shul was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Started by around 40 hotel owners, the shul has been variously dubbed the “Synagogue-on-the-Lake” and a “Jewel of a Shul.” The
Book of Remembrance
includes historical, religious, and artistic material. There is a preface by Maurie Sacks, who helped get this shul on the National Register. The volume is available for a minimum contribution of $36 to Hebrew Congregation of Loch Sheldrake, Loch Sheldrake, NY 12759. Only 200 copies of the limited edition of 500 copies are available.

Oscar Israelowitz,
Catskills Guide
(Brooklyn, NY: Israelowitz Publications, 1992 [Box 228, Brooklyn, NY 11229])

Covering the entire Catskills region in an idiosyncratic fashion, this book has information on a whole range of historic subjects, mostly available elsewhere. Its most valuable features are pictures of Catskills synagogues and a list of former synagogues of the region.

Stefan Kanfer,
A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills, from the Early Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989)

Kanfer’s history starts with early Catskills life before the Jews, and situates the Jews in history by going as far back as the 1830s Sholem colony that failed. Kanfer also spends a good deal of time on Catskills growth, discussing Jewish immigration and living conditions. There is interesting material on gambling, on World War II in the Mountains, and on the interhotel basketball league and game-fixing scandal in the 1950s. Kanfer brings things up to the 1980s when Zen centers and ashrams joined the throngs of Hasidim.

Abraham Lavender and Clarence Steinberg,
Jewish Farmers of the Catskills
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995)

This is a powerfully researched story of the Jewish farmers of Ulster and Sullivan counties through the whole twentieth century. Lavender is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Florida International University; Clarence Steinberg, raised on his parents’ Catskills farm, recently retired as a Public Affairs Specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Based on extensive interviews and lengthy archival research, the authors give us a detailed view of the lives of Catskills farmers, the synagogues they built, and the towns they lived in. This fine book shows the interweaving of people’s lives in the farming sector and the resort industry.

Irwin Richman,
Borscht Belt Bungalows: Memories of Catskill Summers
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998)

Not only did Richman grow up on his family’s colony, but he later worked as counselor and camp director in other colonies, and his grandfather provided mortgages to many others. So Richman has a firm background in his subject matter, which he addresses in a wonderful combination of personal memoir and historical research. No one else has provided such a wealth of data on the daily activities of bungalow colony dwellers. This is the only Catskills book to have chapters on religion in the bungalow colonies and on the day camp, a major contribution of Catskills resorts to American life. Richman brings us up to date on the last few decades, during which orthodox and Hasidic Jews have become the predominant bungalow residents. There are lots of wonderful graphics, including probably the only known architectural renderings of bungalows and kuchalayns.

Irwin Richman,
The Catskills in Vintage Postcards
(Charleston, SC: Arcadia Press, 2000 [2 Cumberland St., Charleston, SC, 29401])

This beautiful book has more than 200 black and white illustrations of postcards from all walks of Catskills life. While there is special emphasis on the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, Richman covers the entire history of the area. There are postcards of local life and the grand resorts of the pre-Jewish Catskills. Each has a concise and informative caption.

Irwin Richman,
Sullivan County/Borscht Belt
(Charleston, SC: Arcadia Press, 2001 [2 Cumberland St., Charleston, SC, 29401])

This book has 200 photographs, postcards, and other pieces of memorabilia of the Sullivan County experience, divided into four sections: Sullivan County before the Borscht Belt, Borscht Belt towns, kuchalayns and bungalow colonies, and hotels.

Robert L. Schain,
A Study of the Historical Development of the Resort Industry in the Catskills of New York
Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1969

This is the only dissertation published on the Catskills. Schain worked for years in the Catskills, and at the time of his dissertation research in 1967 and 1968 he was activities director at the Windsor Hotel. Schain interviewed a phenomenal number of staff, guests, owners, and others to provide a valuable history of the Catskills in three periods: 1900–1920, 1920–1945, and 1945–1968. There are detailed descriptions of the organization of hotel staff and their tasks, food and activities, and financing. Schain has many figures on numbers of rooms and guests in various hotels.

Manville Wakefield,
To the Mountains by Rail
(Grahamsville, NY: Wakefair Press, 1970)

This book is important for the early history of the railroads, especially the Ontario and Western (O&W), which people called the “Old and Weary.” Up till the early 1950s, the railroad was still an important mode of transportation to the Catskills. Wakefield had been the official Sullivan County historian, and wrote several other books on the region. This book also contains many good photographs and mentions many of the old hotels, which used the O&W’s annual “Summer Homes” brochure as a major advertising medium. The foreword by Irwin Richman has several interesting Jewish anecdotes.