In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" Read Free Page B

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 classes and occupations. While there was class stratification due to the range of costs in different resorts, even some of the more expensive places were nevertheless accessible, if only for a weekend. People in their teens and twenties came to work their way through college and professional or graduate school, making the Catskills a core element of Jewish upward mobility. From John Gerson’s first Jewish boarding house in the late 1890s, the Catskills beckoned people to come up for fresh air, recovery from illness, a place in the country, a haimishe vacation. The modest farmhouses and boarding houses eventually gave way to bungalow colonies ranging from five to more than 100 bungalows each, and to hotels holding from 20 to 2,000 people. There was always someplace for everyone, inexpensive or luxurious.
    A sense of community pervaded the Catskills. The very vastness of the resort culture made this possible—people were involved in an individual community and were also part of a gigantic Catskillswide community. Like the landsmanshaftn that Jews created to provide friendship and security for their friends and kin from European shtetls and towns, these resorts were full of people sharing a common background. Smaller hotels frequently employed “solicitors” to recruit guests from their neighborhoods, and hotels acquired that local culture, which continued into the rest of the year. Guests returned year after year, and often generation after generation—a child in the day camp might later be a junior counselor, when older work as a busboy or waiter in the dining room, and in the near future return with a spouse and children. Guests developed loyalty to the hotel and its owners, based on family, friendship, and participation in a miniature society where relationships were amplified by proximity. Even in many of the larger hotels, owners reported knowing and greeting the majority of their guests prior to the expansion of the 1960s. But even without that personal connection to owners, the larger hotels had a small-town feeling. Many of the workers were closely bonded with each other, with the owners, and with long-standing guests. Staff shared that community for the whole summer, frequently working for years in the same resort, and many friendships lasted past the summer. Staff-guest romances also contributed to the continuing connections.
    These hotels, colonies, and kuchalayns were not merely resorts but miniature societies, where people knew lots about each other and created intricate relationships in a neighborhood and family milieu. Further, the accumulation of these many small communities built a giant community extending through Ulster, Sullivan, very southern Greene, and the tiniest sliver of southeastern Delaware counties, a phenomenon unlike any other resort culture then or since. Much like in their home towns and neighborhoods, people would experience this larger community through frequent visits to delis and shops in nearby towns, constant walking down the road past numerous other resorts, and visiting friends and relatives in other hotels and bungalow colonies. Bungalow dwellers were always sneaking into hotel casinos for the shows, guest at small hotels were doing the same in larger hotels, and staff were perpetually visiting other hotels for romance. Through the small and large communities they built, the Jews created in the Catskills a cultural location that symbolized their transformation into Americans: their growth into the middle class, their ability to replace some anxiety with relaxation, their