In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (71 page)

Memoirs, Biography, Autobiography

Joey Adams with Henry Tobias,
The Borscht Belt
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966)

Joey Adams, who died in 1999, was a major comic in the Catskills and a well-known
New York Post
humor columnist. This book remains the classic version of an entertainer’s tale of Catskills comedy, music, tummling, and hotel life. The account of kuchalayn life in the 1920s is especially rich. The book contains wonderful photos from the 1930s through the 1950s, offering an insider’s story lavishly garnished with jokes and reminiscences.

Esterita Blumberg,
Remember the Catskills: Tales by a Recovering Hotelkeeper
(Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1996)

Esterita Blumberg grew up at Green Acres Hotel in Lake Huntington, and eventually operated it. When it burned, her family bought another hotel in Loch Sheldrake to run with the same name. Blumberg wrote a monthly column, “Those Were the Days,” for the Catskill/Hudson
Jewish Star
, on which much of this book is based. There is interesting material on leftist politics in the Catskills. The book has many photographs, advertisements, menus, and rate schedules.

H. Charles Bluming,
Jew Boy in Goy Town: A Catskill Mountain Odyssey
(1994; privately printed; $15.00 plus $3.00 mailing from Mildred Bluming, 10375 Wilshire Blvd, Ste. 7B, Los Angeles, CA 90024)

Hy Bluming’s engaging memoir is a rare look at the daily life of early Catskills farmers and boarding house operators. This emotionally powerful book gives a great portrayal of Jewish farmers, widespread anti-Semitism, and the early resort experience. Bluming’s family arrived in Greenfield Park before World War I, then spent the bulk of their Mountain years in Kerhonkson. Bluming writes about the burning cross and KKK rally near their Kerhonkson hotel, the Sunrise Hill Farm, and the burning out of a nearby Jewish farmer. The struggle against anti-Semitism takes both the brain and the diplomacy of Bluming’s father and the brawn of Butch Rosenberg, who stands down an angry mob. With little religious background but a deep solidarity with his Jewish comrades, the rugged carpenter Rosenberg puts all his energy into leading the building of a small shul in Kerhonkson. Butch lovingly carves a Mogen David to crown the shul, and finds it smashed by local anti-Semites. Daring the culprits to meet him in the town center, Butch takes them on successfully, scaring the rest away. Bluming’s father uses a different approach. He is the local
shochet
and lay spiritual leader of the small Jewish community, and he exudes deep inner strength in making his way among the difficulties of this area. Harry Bluming marches into the local church to decry the locals who have desecrated the shul. He appeals to everyone’s belief in the Constitution and freedom of religion, and asks the church congregation’s assistance in protecting the synagogue. His chutzpah works, and the pastor brings his congregation to the dedication of the shul with its second Star of David. Butch, of course, has the honor of carrying the Torah to establish the new shul. Like protagonists in other Catskills books, Hi returns after more than forty years away to find remnants of school, farm, and shul.

Mitzi Crane,
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Monticello
(2000; privately published; $10 from Mitzi Crane, 7705 Dundee Lane, Delray Beach, FL 33446)

This is a charming memoir of a woman who became an entertainer and is still performing in Florida. One of the interesting historical contributions is the life of her parents, whose own parents were temporary partners—one of the variations on the Catskills hotel business—in fifteen hotels. There are interesting stories and lots of reproductions of photos and menus.

Sonia Pressman Fuentes,
Eat First—You Don’t Know What They’ll Give You: The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter
(Philadelphia: Xlibris Publishing, 2000)

This is the story of a five-year-old immigrant girl who came to this country with her family from Berlin, Germany to escape the Holocaust and grew up to become a founder of the Second Wave of the women’s movement. Through Fuentes’s tales and anecdotes we come to know her, her parents, and her brother as the family arrives in the United States in 1934 and two years later settles in Woodridge, where they ran a kuchalayn for five years. Then they built a bungalow colony on the Port Jervis Road in Monticello. Of the book’s forty-six chapters, seven take place in the Catskills. (
[email protected]
web:
http://www.xlibris.com
, mail: Xlibris Corp. 123 Chestnut St., Suite 402 Philadelphia, PA 19106)

Tania Grossinger,
Growing Up at Grossinger’s
(New York: David MacKay, 1975)

Tania Grossinger’s mother was the hostess at the relatives’ hotel, so Tania got great inside stories on the staff, guests, and visiting sports figures and entertainers. This is a humorous book that also provides a glimpse of life from an intelligent insider’s point of view. She describes such events as occasional drives to New York City with Harry Grossinger on his twice-weekly meat shopping trips, part of the hotel’s desire for the best quality food, and the weekly formalized Shabbos sale of the hotel to a Gentile staff member so that entertainment would be considered legitimate. No one else has written about the difficult life of being a “staff kid,” a very in-between status in hotel culture. There are great photos of celebrities who frequented the hotel as guests and entertainers.

Moss Hart,
Act One: An Autobiography
(New York: Random House, 1959)

The famous playwright began as a social director in an earlier era when social directors had large staffs that produced full-length variety shows and musicals every week. The adults-only summer camps where Hart worked were places where many people, especially men, sometimes actually slept in tents. Starting in 1929 he worked at the Flagler Hotel, famous for its large casino and elegant shows, where Dory Schary was one of his assistants. Hart describes in detail the weekly schedule of entertainment for which he was responsible, from major theatrical productions to campfires.

Joel Pomerantz,
Jennie and the Story of Grossinger’s
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1970)

This is an authorized and “official” biography of the famous Jennie Grossinger and Grossinger’s Hotel (indeed, the copyright is in Jennie Grossinger’s name), full of stories about the resort from its early founding. Published two decades after Harold Taub’s “official” book, it has much more up-to-date information on the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s. There are lots of good descriptions of the food and the many activities, and even of the plane landing on a golf fairway that prompted the hotel to build its own airport.

Arthur Tanney, “Memoirs of Bungalow Life” (
http://catskills.brown.edu
)

At this point only published on the Catskills Institute Web site, but hopefully soon available in book form, these are very moving reminiscences of Tanney’s many years living in colonies, as a child and later as an adult with his own family. Tanney has taken some of the most ordinary activities and experiences of bungalow life and shown how significant they were for people. Romance, day camp, salamander catching, movie night, and sports are among the subjects he eloquently describes. Perhaps the most popular is his piece on Ruby the Knishman, a famous bungalow colony peddler.

Harold Jaediker Taub,
Waldorf in the Catskills: The Grossinger Legend
(New York: Sterling, 1952)

This is an early “official” look at Grossinger’s, complete with twenty-four pages of family recipes. Taub walks us through the family history from the earliest days of searching for a place in the country to the many developments that made Grossinger’s famous worldwide. The style is chatty, as if we were hearing conversations of generations of Grossingers. There is a particularly interesting chapter on the hotel’s support for the U.S. effort in World War II, when Grossinger’s sold many war bonds and shipped many packages to the GIs.

Henry Tobias,
Music in My Heart and Borscht in My Blood
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 1987)

Henry Tobias opens this memoir by talking about how the book he wrote with Joey Adams,
The Borscht Belt
, was originally his creation, but Adams’s name and involvement finally got it published (Tobias was only a “with” author). Stylistically, this is a similar book (with even a few overlapping stories) by a prolific songwriter who also was a musician and tummler at many Catskills hotels. There are lots of short takes on comics, singers, hotel owners, and booking agents, providing further insight into the entertainment world of the era. There is interesting material on the early use of the term “borscht belt” and on the ways that Catskills entertainment staff used to pirate Broadway shows.

Essays

Elizabeth Ehrlich’s “Bungalow,” from
Miriam’s Kitchen
(New York: Penguin, 1998) offers a very tender look at Ehrlich’s relationship with her mother-in-law, Miriam, who teaches her how to cook while reliving her life experiences in the Holocaust and since. While we don’t usually think of bungalow colony life as full of great food, Miriam’s bungalow is a feasting place. Memories are expressed in the food: “The table is
gemakht
, ready, with barely a centimeter to spare. Here is a plate of sliced melon, blueberries, strawberries, and a bowl of sugar for the berries. There may be ripe tomatoes cut into chunks with raw Spanish onion, oil, and wine vinegar. Perhaps a herring in cream sauce, or a tin of smoked sardines…. There are fresh little challah rolls, or heavy slices of corn rye bread festooned with caraway seeds. Cream cheese with scallions.” Ehrlich recounts an interesting Catskills bungalow colony tradition of collective meals of delicatessen or smoked fish on Saturday night in the casino. This is a wonderful example of how food binds people together.

Robert Eisenberg has a chapter, “Bungalow Summer,” in
Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground
(New York: HarperCollins, 1996), giving an account of the Hasidic and ultraorthodox communities that now represent the largest aspect of Jewish life in the Catskills. Among the stops on his tour are the Lubavitchers’ Ivy League Torah Program and a doctor’s office at Fialkoff’s Bungalow Colony. He also reports on his visit to Elat Chayyim, the Jewish Renewal center in Accord.

Vivian Gornick’s “The Catskills Remembered,” in
Approaching Eye Level
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), recounts the difficulties of being a waitress in the Catskills, where waiters predominated. She portrays the competitive edge among the waitstaff, the tension between them and their guests, and the conflicts they had with the maitre d’. This is definitely the harder end of the dining room life. For those in the know, Gornick’s fictional names are vividly recognizable—her Stella Mercury employment agency was really Annie Jupiter’s, a New York City agency that supplied many of the hotels.

Howard Jacobson, a British Jew, traveled around the world visiting Jewish communities for his book
Roots, Shmoots: Journeys Among Jews
(New York: Penguin, 1995). Chapter 3, “People Who Need People,” is a sarcastic look at his Rosh Hashanah stay at the Concord a few years ago. Mostly set in the dining room, it portrays the guests as negatively as possible.

Daniel Pinkwater, known for his humorous commentaries on National Public Radio, wrote a book,
The Afterlife Diet
(Philadelphia: Xlibris, 1999), in which overweight people go to a certain heaven comprised only of their fellow
zaftig
departed—for them, heaven is a Catskills hotel, full of
fressers
. Even there, the guests still complain. This is a very funny book that includes a New York delicatessen where a psychiatrist conducts treatment while people eat; the guests/patients pay a combined bill for therapy and meals at the cash register.

Sarah Sandberg’s books
Mama Made Minks
(New York: Doubleday, 1964) and
My Sister Goldie
(New York: Doubleday, 1968) are very chatty memoirs, almost like collections of magazine installments. Both contain segments with titles like “Oh, to Be in Grossinger’s Now That April’s Here,” providing pictures of the dating scene and of the richness of the meals both in the dining room and in the napkins that delivered food back to the guest rooms. Sandberg’s furrier family also used the dining room as a place to parade new minks and recruit customers.

Hotels of the Catskills

T
he list of hotels maintained by the Catskills Institute is an ongoing project. Each newly found name is another treasure to add to the collective memory of the Catskills hotels. Ben Kaplan, a long-time Catskills resident, was for twelve years the Executive Director of the Sullivan County Resort Association, and for another ten years head of Sullivan County’s Office of Public Information. In 1991 he published a list of hotels in the
Sullivan County Democrat
newspaper, in four parts, on July 26, July 30, August 2, and August 6. Many people responded with additional hotel names, adding to the historical record. Ben Kaplan provided me with the original published list and a typescript of the updated list. I am grateful to him and to the
Sullivan County Democrat
for permission to print the whole list, which is based on their initial research. I found many additional names of Ulster County hotels, which have been less well documented and written about, from the 1956 edition of the
Ulster County Resort Association
, kindly located by John A. Umverzagt, and from the undated but clearly World War II–era “Ellenville, Town of Wawarsing on the Shawangunk Trail—A Vacationland Guide,” kindly located by Gary Platt. I have discovered other hotel names through my research and interviews.