In the Catskills

A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains"

Phil Brown, Phil Brown

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231504409
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia judía

"A nostalgic pastiche of fiction, memoir, photography, art, postcards, menus, etc., celebrating Jewish resort life in the Catskills."— Providence Journal With selections ranging from literature to song lyrics, this bookhighlights the Catskills experience over a century, and assesses its continuing impact on American music, comedy, food, culture, and religion. It features selections from such fiction writers as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Herman Wouk, Allegra Goodman and Vivian Gornick; and original contributions from historians, sociologists, and scholars of American and Jewish culture that trace the history of the region, the rise of hotels and bungalow colonies, the wonderful flavors of food and entertainment, and distinctive forms of Jewish religion found in the Mountains. What was life—the work, the play, the food, the romance—like at Catskills Mountains resorts? These very personal recollections capture the special sense of community and freedom that developed among Jewish families leaving the city behind for a summer vacation and enjoying a cultural space of their own. From "Bingo by the Bungalow" by Thane Rosenbaum to "Young Workers in the Hotels" by Phil Brown to "Shoot the Shtrudel to Me Yudel" by Henry Foner, this charming anthology captures an era that has had enormous impact on the Jewish experience and American culture as a whole. "A warm, charming, and valuable work. Much of the writing is simply gorgeous."— Contemporary Sociology

Part 1

HISTORY

INTRODUCTION

The history of the Jewish Catskills really starts on the farms. Baron de Hirsch, a major Jewish philanthropist, funded many agricultural projects that put Jews onto farms in places such as Argentina, South Dakota, Saskatchewan, New Jersey, and the Catskills. From the first years of the twentieth century, the farms of Ulster and Sullivan counties were a major part of the early Jewish settlement there, providing a year-round Jewish population base and the building and support of synagogues. These were primarily dairy and chicken farms, since not much else grew well in the region. In the middle of the twentieth century, Sullivan County led the state in egg production. The long-term impact of the farms was their taking in boarders to supplement their meager income. Some farmers decided to make the boarding business their main enterprise. Once the boarding house was established, it might develop along one of two routes. Some became kuchalayns (boarding houses where renters shared kitchen facilities), which frequently transformed into bungalow colonies. Others became hotels (as did some kuchalayns later). These transformations will be the subject of the following two sections. Here, we focus on the origins of the farms and offer some glimpses of the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on local life and on resorts.

Phil Brown’s opening essay, “Sleeping in My Parents’ Hotel,” sets the stage for this collection. Through his account of sleeping in the current incarnation of what had been his parents’ hotel in the 1940s and 1950s, he notes the themes that shape the book.

Abraham Lavender and Clarence Steinberg’s selection, “Jewish Farmers of the Catskills,” comes from their book of that title, a masterful study from documents, interviews, and personal experience. They offer a slice of farm life, the challenges farmers faced, the support they got from the Jewish Agricultural Society, and their importance in the local Jewish community. Clarence Steinberg grew up on a farm in Ellenville and later worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so he well understands the legacy of the Jewish farmers.

Reuben Wallenrod’s “Hotels and the Holocaust” comes from Dusk in the Catskills, his novel tracing the seasonal life of a small hotel modeled on Rosenblatt’s Hotel in Glen Wild, where Wallenrod often stayed. This excerpt illustrates the conflict between having a good time on vacation and the reality of the massacre of Jews in Nazi Europe.

Martin Boris, in “The Catskills at the End of World War II,” also addresses this era, but right after the war and with reference to local residents. This is an excerpt from his Woodridge 1946, which centers on Our Place, a Woodridge restaurant, and its owners, workers, and customers. Among other things, Boris deals with conflicts between traditional religious traditions and leftist politics. Indeed, this book is one of the few writings we have about communist and socialist activities in the Catskills.

Sleeping in My Parents’ Hotel:
The End of a Century of the Jewish Catskills

Phil Brown

On beautiful August 3, 1998, I was sleeping in my parents’ old hotel in the Catskills. A half century ago, that would have been pretty unremarkable, but William and Sylvia Brown owned Brown’s Hotel Royal on White Lake only from 1946 to 1952. It’s a miracle the place still stands, recycled as the Bradstan Country Hotel and beautifully detailed with luxurious antiques and appointments far exceeding an old Catskills hotel. Most small hotels—the Royal would be stuffed at 60 guests—long ago collapsed, burned, or simply were reclaimed by the land. For my book, Catskill Culture, I compiled a list of 926 hotels (subsequently expanded to 1,094 on the Catskills Institute Web site) that graced the Jewish summer paradise of Sullivan and Ulster counties over the last century. Less than two handfuls remain, none of them as small as the Royal, and they close at an alarming rate.

That’s why the Royal’s survival is so spectacular. I “found” it in 1993, on my first field trip to the Catskills, after having stayed away since 1979. Like many others who worked hard in the Catskills or who tired of the culture, I fled after finishing college. It took many years to integrate into my adult life the ambivalence that I had always experienced there. I had been uprooted every year in May from school and friends to go there and live with my parents in cramped rooms. I watched my parents work extremely hard each summer, three months’ labor with not a single day off. We never had our own summer vacation, but only served other people on theirs. Also, like many others, I fled from the strong Jewish culture of the area, not knowing until recently how to make sense of it.

I say that I “found” the Royal because my parents, until they died—my father in 1972, my mother in 1991—hid from me their failed venture into the hotel business. Certainly, they had told me that they once had a hotel, when I was born. They even showed me some photos of us there. But they said the hotel was “gone.” Surely they knew it still stood, in various reincarnations, including a seedy rooming house, since they worked the Catskills their whole lives and knew an enormous number of people and places there. My father died working in his coffee shop concession at Chaits Hotel in Accord, and my mother remained cooking there till 1979. For many of their years working in Swan Lake, they drove right past White Lake en route to Monticello. My father often worked for Dependable Employment Agency, driving new hires all over the Mountains, so he would undoubtedly have passed it many times. And nowhere was that far that they couldn’t have shown me their old hotel, especially since I often asked. All I ever got was, “It’s gone,” even when we spent several weeks in May on the Kauneonga side of White Lake at our friends George and Miriam Shapiro’s bungalow colony while my parents looked for work.

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 clas...