Yesterday's Borscht and Knishes Return as Today's Reading List
August 31, 2000
By JOSEPH BERGER
MONTICELLO, N.Y., Aug. 27 -- The Catskills have always been
synonymous with comedy, with the shtick and shpritz of Sid
Caesar, Jerry Lewis and Mel Brooks. But the glorious mountains
here and the flavorful summertime crowds they drew have also
proved to be a fertile ground for more thoughtful dramas,
fiction
and films about love, betrayal, even struggles with faith.
In the bungalow colonies -- the Jewish working-class family's
chance to flee the city's sweltering apartments on the cheap --
wives and children would be left on their own during the week
until the husbands drove or bummed rides back for the weekend.
That premise inspired Pamela Gray, a bungalow baby herself,
to
write the screenplay that became the 1998 film "A Walk on the
Moon," which tells of the affair between one of these stranded
wives and a hippie "blouse man" who comes to the colony to
peddle
clothes during the Woodstock summer of 1969.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, in "Enemies: A Love Story," mined the
poignant contrast between the carefree exterior of these
summertime Edens and the inner melancholy of refugees who just
a
few years earlier had lost their families in Hitler's war.
More
recently Allegra Goodman, in her first novel, "Kaaterskill
Falls," looked at soul-searching among pale-faced Orthodox
Jewish
men and their long-sleeved wives spending their summers as
anomalies in the bedrock American villages of these mountains.
Though it may seem too grandiose to say so, the Jewish world
of
the Catskills that thrived from the start of the 20th century
until the 1970's seems to be accumulating something of a genre
worthy of serious literary and cinematic study. Add Herman
Wouk's
1955 novel "Marjorie Morningstar," the 1987 hotel movies "Dirty
Dancing" and "Sweet Lorraine," and a library shelf of Catskills
memoirs, and you have enough for an academic conference, which
in
fact was staged last weekend for the sixth summer at one of the
surviving dowager hotels here, Kutsher's Country Club.
Amid classic Catskills ambience -- clamorous dinners of borscht
and boiled beef, games of shuffleboard and a nightclub
performance
by four gray-haired doo-wop singers, the Elegants, who joked
about
their triple bypasses and enlarged prostates -- 100 Catskills
alumni, hotel owners, writers and sociologists spent three days
reading from and analyzing Catskills novels and memoirs.
Of course they could not escape the laughter.
Arthur J. Tanney,
who frequented the bungalows as a child, read excerpts from
short
reminiscences he has placed on a Web site
(www.brown.edu/Research/Catskills Institute) that evoked the
single phone shared by all of a colony's denizens, the
invasive
loudspeaker announcements, the flickering movies shown in the
casino. (Year after year it was always "The Guns of Navarone"
and
something with Rock Hudson and Doris Day.)
******
A Simon says game at
Grossinger's in Liberty in 1985.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
And he remembered Ruby the Knish Man, who drove up to the
colony
to sell his goods and announced his presence in a gravelly
Yiddish-inflected voice: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Ruby
the
Knish Man. I'm now on the premises with my homogenized,
pasteurized and recently circumcised potato knishes. Please
folks
come. I need the money."
Kidding aside, what was it about the Catskills that still fires
the literary imagination?
"Some places simply seem to be the repository of stories," said
Terry Kay, a Southern writer who read from his 1994 novel
"Shadow
Song."
The book tells the story of Madison Lee Murphy, known as Bobo,
a
Georgian so provincial he knew only one Jew, who comes up to
the
Catskills to work as a waiter and falls irrevocably in love
with a
beautiful Jewish girl. Mr. Kay, who comes from Ty Cobb's
northern
Georgia town, Royston, did in fact work for three summers in
the
1950's at the Colonial Hill in Pine Hill to help pay for
college,
though after one grueling weekend washing a mountain of dishes,
he
told his brother he did not want to go to college anymore.
What gives Mr. Kay's novel much of its emotional power is the
contrast between Bobo and the Jews who people the hotel, some
of
them with numbers tattooed on their arms. In real life it
sometimes made for comedy. "I made a lot of money saying 'Gut
morgen, y'all," he says in a resonant Billy Graham voice. But
it
also gave him a more serious theme for his fiction.
*****
A grandfather and grandsons
in Kerhonkson in 1969
Barton Silverman/The New York Times
"It was a place where the guests were made to feel they
belonged,
and to them belonging was important," he writes of the hotel.
"Most were Jewish refugees from the First and Second World
Wars.
They understood what it meant to be displaced, and they
understood, even more keenly, what it meant to belong."
Mr. Kay's narrator, after all, is as displaced in the
Catskills
as the guests are in America.
It was in such contrasts between gentile and Jew, between
cornbread and challah, between community and loneliness that
his
story blossomed and, he says, much of the other Catskills
literature has found its voice. "The most essential thing in
writing fiction is understanding contrast, and that world was
a
great contrast to this boy from the rural foothills of the
South,"
he said.
The vulgarity and excess associated the Catskills have been
easy
to mock, and the hotel comedians were more than willing to do
so
right in the face of the summer revelers. But writers have also
felt a need to portray with tenderness the impulse that
brought
tenement Jews who had known hunger during wars or the
Depression
up to these mountains in the hope of seizing some relief in
pine-scented air, bracing lake water and merciful shade.
"They didn't have to be like the greenhorns and stay in
tenements," said Phil Brown, a 51-year-old professor of
sociology
at Brown University (no relation). "They could come up here and
have a regular vacation like the Americans."
Mr. Brown, the child of a family that operated a Catskills
hotel
in the late 1940's and early 1950's, has made the Catskills his
passion. He is a founder of the Catskills Institute, the
year-round organization that runs the conferences, and he has
even
taught a seminar at Brown on the Catskills experience, complete
with a five-page reading list.
The world of the Catskills was rich in the kind of quirky and
colorful situations that writers love to milk. The bungalow
colonies, for example, were not just clusters of cottages
around a
lawn but a distinct culture. The heart of this necklace of
cramped
two-room shacks was the loftily named casino, a social hall
where
the only gambling involved bingo or the cigar-flavored poker
games
that men played on weekends.
*****
The author Terry Kay, at
the Catskills Institute's meeting at Kutsher's in Monticello
Chris Ramirez for The New York Times
In the daytime it was where teenagers gathered to play Ping-
Pong
and take their first stabs at sex. In the evenings it was
where
their parents came to watch third-rate comics, hypnotists,
magicians, even an occasional stripper sent up from New York
by
the Broadway Danny Roses of that time.
Mr. Tanney captures the pleasure children took in sneaking
peaks
into the casino and relishing their hard-working parents' rare
forays into merriment.
At the hotels, which had a slightly more upscale crowd, the
sexual attraction between the vacationing women and the staffs
of
muscular busboys and waiters inspired "Dirty Dancing" and
"Marjorie Morningstar." Mr. Wouk had been the children's waiter
at
the Tamarack Lodge in the 30's, and in his novel, Marjorie is a
camp counselor who, like thousands of counselors and bungalow
inmates in real life, sneaks into a hotel, where she falls in
love
with its social director, Noel Airman. Marjorie's parents
though
want her to marry someone traditionally successful, and a
songsmith
is not what they had in mind.
Those at the conference were profoundly aware that they were
visitors to a vanishing world; one guest compared her capering
at
Kutsher's to getting a chance to sail on the Titanic before it
sank. A world that in its heyday had more than 500 hotels and
bungalow colonies and a million summertime visitors has been
reduced to a handful of hotels surrounded by decaying bungalows
and swimming pools with trees growing out of them.
For writers, that sense of loss gives their works an extra
piquancy. Mr. Kay, in his novel, describes the mountain towns
he
visits decades after his waiter days as "ghost towns."
"Each moment is a visit with the ghost of who I used to be,
and
with the ghosts of all the people I knew," Mr. Kay writes. 'I
see
them. They are walking in their toddling steps on sidewalks and
they are sitting in the fold-out lounge chairs beside the
neglected ruin of the swimming pool. They ask me for water --
'Wasser! Wasser!' -- in the dining room."
Many of the Catskills tales are seen from the point of view of
children coming of age savoring the freedom to roam and
experiment
in pastoral safety rather than the dicey streets of New York.
"I had my first kiss in the woods behind the bungalow colony,"
said Ms. Gray. "And the people writing about the Catskills
probably had those experiences back then."
She knew that in writing her screenplay she was aiming not
just
for a wide public but for Catskills aficionados grateful that
their little-known world was finally getting an airing. But at
last year's conference purists quibbled with the size of the
kitchen in Ms. Gray's movie -- she acknowledges that it had to
be
made big to squeeze in a film crew -- and with the fact that
there
never was a vendor that looked like the handsome lover of her
film.
"They looked more like Dom DeLuise," Mr. Tanney said.
Much of the Catskills fiction of course has been seen through
rose-tinted glasses of adults looking back nostalgically at
their
impressionable youth. And there were some at the conference who
were not shy about pointing out the discrepancies.
"They say those were the good times, but that's baloney," said
Bob Fuller, an 82-year-old real estate owner in Brooklyn Heights
who remembers renting a kochalayn ("cook alone") -- a room in a
boarding house with a common kitchen -- for $75. "I was poor. I
envied the people in the hotels. When I wanted to go back to
the
city, I had to hitch a ride. That wasn't a good time. Now is
the
good time."
But the reason for the sunburst of Catskills writing is that
writers are eager to look back at their youth, when as Mr.
Tanney
said, the days seemed endless and most complicated thing he had
to
think about was what was for lunch.
"We're more connected than we've ever been in history, with
the
Internet, cell phones and cable TV," Mr. Tanney told the
conference. "As connected as we are, we're more disconnected
than
we've ever been. And that sense of community that I experienced
in
the bungalows, of belonging, of being in the same place
together
is gone."
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