Yiddish in the Mountains

EDITED TO ADD: For kids my age ('80s babies) Jews in the Catskills means one thing: DIRTY DANCING. Well, on Tuesday, September 14, DIRTY DANCING screenwriter Eleanor Bernstein will be talking about the stories from her own life which inspired the movie, as well as lots of juicy 'behind the scenes' memories. The event will be live streamed from the Center for Jewish History. More info and tickets here...

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I didn't grow up going to the Catskills. The golden age of the Jewish Catskills was long over by the time I came along and neither of my parents grew up in the New York area. There was simply no nostalgic attachment to draw us there. My real introduction to the area's faded glory was in the winter of 1998, when I attended my first KlezKamp. 

For my July column, I set to researching  Yiddish in the Catskills. The big hotels (Kutshers, Grossingers) have, of course, become synonymous with the Catskills, and the comics who came out of those hotels are the Borscht Belt. The boisterous, in-your-face style of those comics was matched by hotel guests who knew what they wanted and weren't shy about getting it:   

That image of the Catskills persists today: a shrieking, shpritzing, fressing, Jews-only paradise (and antisemite’s nightmare), where mating was pursued with the kind of collective single-mindedness to make a salmon pause upstream in admiration. With some degree of ambivalence, Richler called the hotel guests “sitting ducks for satire.” Weren’t these Jews simply living the American dream of abundance and security?, he wondered. In any case, he assured us, hotel guests had a sense of humor about themselves. Whatever you might say about them, they had already said, loudly, and worse.

Catskills hotels, where mating was pursued with the kind of collective single-mindedness to make a salmon pause upstream in admiration. Sure, singles were there to find mates (to put it mildly). But sex was just as important to families who came up for extended summer stays. Often times, the women and kids would stay at a bungalow or kokhaleyn (a self-catering kind of holiday rental) during the week and the men would come up on the weekend. This didn't make it into my column, but I kept coming across references to the men who would come up for the weekend: they traveled on the bull train or a solo husband driving himself was making the bull run. Forget about salmon, our metaphor has moved out of the stream and onto the farm. Buckle up, friends. Jewish continuity is not a child's game. 

For research, I watched The Goldbergs 1954 summer arc, where the whole family heads off to Pincus Pines hotel. Each episode opens with Gertrude Berg (playing Molly Goldberg) pushing Rybutol vitamins on us. She tells us Rybutol can counteract the draining effect of the summer heat. I only hope all those husbands were taking Rybutol before heading off to do their mountain duties.

On this episode, the Goldbergs are still at home in the Bronx when Mr. Pincus (the Yiddish theater great Joseph Buloff) comes to visit. 

Interestingly, Gertrude Berg was born to Catskills hotel owners. Far from the character of Molly Goldberg, though, Berg spoke unaccented English and had to read any Yiddish lines phonetically. Here we have Joe Buloff, originally of the Vilne Troupe, playing a put upon hotelier, and Gertrude Berg, the thoroughly American daughter of hoteliers, playing the greenhorn hotel guest. That's showbiz, right?

(Side note: once I started watching The Goldbergs, I started thinking of daughter Rosie as the Marilyn Munster of the Goldberg family. She's the young, thin, beautiful one who clearly fits in with mainstream American society. The parents' generation is still that of immigrants. And, of course, what is The Munsters but a story of immigrants trying their cheerful best to assimilate???)

On this episode, daughter Rosalie is bored because there are no eligible young men to talk to. Then a young, single doctor comes along and the hotel guests collectively lose their minds.

And finally, my favorite episode, where we get to see the hotel staff getting ready to close out the season and put on their end of summer talent show. The chef "Maurice" is played by a German-Jewish actor named Marcel Hillaire. After the war he came to America and reinvented himself as a "Frenchman" for hire. His "Maurice" seems to be typical of the shtik he toured around the country.