The Holocaust, the Catskills, and the Creative Power of Loss

Abstract

My parents took their honeymoon in 1946, at the Nevele Country Club in Sullivan County, New York. The Catskills beckoned the young couple, as they had welcomed tens of thousands of Jews, young and old, American and immigrant, families and singles, for decades. Like my mother and her family, the Jews vacationing in the Catskill Mountains came primarily from New York City. In this city, and this America, it was expected that my mother's friends' parents--like her own--had thick foreign accents, spoke fluent Yiddish at home, and worked hard to succeed. One sign of success was the ability to take a summer holiday in the Catskill Mountains. Families and close friends or neighbors might share the cost of a rented van for the two-hour ride from Brooklyn to Sullivan County, and then rent rooms or cabins at the same bungalow colony or kuchalayn (boarding house). My mother remembers her first kuchalayn, in Ellenville, as a large farm with chickens and hayrides, and her father--like the other fathers--coming up only on weekends. The American and immigrant Jews, who had made the many hotels, bungalow colonies, and farms of Ulster and Sullivan counties their summer retreats year after year, were always looking for family, for landsmanshaftn (society of immigrants from the same town or region), for a home away from home. As a second home to generations of Jews, the Catskill Mountains became a place where a Jewish family could bond as a Jewish family--that is, they could practice the culture of Judaism without the pressure to assimilate. Families spending summers together with other Jews could anticipate re-creating--and recreating with--these Jewish friends year after year. The Jewish threads of their winter lives might seem to be slowly unraveling through their increasingly secular lives, but the Catskills remained essentially a subculture that they renewed each year, as yet another summer of Jews were beckoned there. Because the Catskill Mountains summoned one with the promise of prolonged engagement and deeply felt connections--replacing the congestion of the city for the wide open spaces of the Mountains-- children and adults mingled in acts of community: feeling nachis as the children paraded their gifts through the weekend talent shows, cooking meals together in the common kitchen of the kuchalayn, meeting for card games every evening. For the parents, each day must have been another rare and wonderful moment when time stands still amid the deep well of family love, safely netted by a sense of community so complete it seemed impossible to find elsewhere. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] By the time my mother's modern Orthodox family took their summer holidays in Ellenville, or Monticello, or Woodridge, staying at chicken farms or rooming houses, it was already a segregated world. Lost was the innocence of the Founding Father's declaration that "All men are created equal." Jews were restricted from participating fully in American society in a number of ways--they experienced professional bias and discrimination by hotels, country clubs, and resorts; neighborhoods and cities limited or denied access to Jews hoping to purchase houses or land. Influential Americans, such as Henry Ford, were publicly denouncing Jews as either international financiers intent on world domination or godless Bolsheviks who undermined American policy and morality. Americans tuning into their radios during the 1930s might hear Father Coughlin's weekly anti-Semitic broadcasts from his Detroit pulpit; they might open their Dearborn Independent and read "Mr. Ford's Page" with its anti-Semitic commentary (Shandler 1999). Those Jews who returned each year to the Catskill Mountains--primarily from New York, but also from Detroit, Philadelphia, or Baltimore--were seeking escape not just from the thick heat of another urban summer; they were hoping to escape from the darkening forces of the era's anti-Semitic proscriptions. II. A new kind of Jewish immigrant community was born from and after World War II, and they, too, purchased or leased colonies together. …