The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland by Marisa Scheinfeld (review)

The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish
   Vacationland by Marisa Scheinfeld (review)

   Victoria M. Breting-Garcia

   New York History, Volume 98, Number 3-4, Summer/Fall 2017, pp. 513-516
   (Review)

   Published by Cornell University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nyh.2017.0015

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/713010

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

Book Reviews   513

is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some,
it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his
fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his
innate manhood.” No doubt some of Patton’s men found his words helpful
and so might Rose, but as Rose proves to himself, there is no substitute for
doing or experiencing. Even writing a book won’t answer. Men of War is
fascinating and a sometimes upsetting work, but it is well worth the effort
by the reader who wants to gain some understanding, however slight, of
the trials of combat.

The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s
Jewish Vacationland.
By Marisa Scheinfeld, with essays by Stefan Kanfer and Jenna Weissman
Joselit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016, 200 pages, $29.95
Cloth.
  Reviewed by Victoria M. Breting-Garcia, Independent Scholar

T    he July 24, 2017 edition of Time magazine featured an article titled,
     “Where Did America’s Summer Jobs Go?” Author Karl Vick of New
Jersey made poignant reference to the declining numbers of young men
and women out of high school and college applying for seasonal work, par-
ticularly in venues associated with summer recreation. Life guards, kiosk
attendants, movie theaters, summer resorts, and day camps—job demo-
graphics have changed over the last sixty years, reflecting the ambitious
values of a nation keenly attuned to upward mobility and career status.
Asking the same question, cross-disciplinary scholars have taken a deeper
look at the Catskill Mountains, carefully documenting the memory of the
summer resorts and the people who worked and played there during the
twentieth century.
    From century to century, the passing of time creates a powerful forum
for memory and the recollection of unique moments in our nation’s social
history. Marisa Scheinfeld’s photographic collection, The Borscht Belt:
Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland—with essays by
noted authors and scholars Stefan Kanfer and Jenna Weissman Joselit—is
a beautiful series of visual compositions designed to evoke the experience of

514     ■ NEW YORK HISTORY

America’s early Jewish communities which rose from the immigrant ghet-
tos of New York City to enjoy the mobile lifestyles so popular at the height
of the modern era. Hard-won prosperity and the expansion of the railroads
into the New York State hinterland created the momentum for the aggre-
gation of rural Catskill Mountain communities into a vibrant resort com-
plex that catered to scores of vacationers, eager to escape the city’s summer
doldrums. Like the velveteen rabbit of Margery Williams’s classic tale, the
Borscht Belt and its cultural artifacts stand as the rumpled remains of an
immigrant community’s warm embrace of their new American homeland.
    Scheinfeld’s opening prologue is followed with a full-page map that
illustrates the locations of many memorable “hotels and bungalow colonies
of the Borscht Belt” (13). Located approximately ninety miles north of
New York City, the southern Catskill resort complex fanned out east and
west along Route 17 in Ulster and Sullivan Counties. Bungalow colonies
were nestled along its tributaries, creating a vibrant multi-layered venue
for summer recreation. While nineteenth-century European fin de siècle
artists lamented the decadence of a passing age, more than two million
Jews vacated the shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe to take refuge in
America. Many settled in the crowded tenement communities for which
Manhattan’s Lower East Side is noted, while other families preferred the
rural lifestyles that the Catskill communities offered. Long inured to hard
poverty and its exclusions, Jewish newcomers to the mountains neverthe-
less bought farms and created homesteads, relying on the railroads for a
steady population of transient merchants and vacationers looking for room
and board.
    The relationship between the city and its mountain resorts was
enhanced in great measure by the flowering sophistication of the popular
arts and the rise of the entertainment industry at the dawn of the twentieth
century. Gilded Age patronage for the classical performing arts gave way to
a popular demand for entertainments for which vaudeville and Broadway
were famous. By the early twentieth century, the Yiddish Theater District
was world-renowned for its productions of classic theatre and entertain-
ments. It was a fertile training ground for many artists whose talents filled
vaudevillian show houses and movie theaters all over the country. Booking
agents contracted resort hotels which provided enthusiastic audiences for
the rising stars of film and radio. Borscht Belt venues were a stronghold

Book Reviews   515

for performers whose sharp wits and warm personas took the edge off
American nativism in homes and communities nationwide. With the dis-
tribution of televised broadcasts, the lively antics and seasoned humor of
dozens of performers became beloved twentieth-century American film
industry classics, including iconic productions by Jack Benny, Milton Berle,
Fanny Brice, Danny Kaye, Buddy Hackett, the Marx Brothers, Henny
Youngman, Jerry Lewis, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers—and the later perfor-
mances of Mel Brooks, Barbara Streisand, Woody Allen, and Billy Crystal.
    Scheinfeld estimates that 538 hotels and more than 50,000 bungalows
were built in the southern Catskills to support a thriving resort industry
with an annual patronage of one million visitors in its heyday (8). The
Catskills Institute at Brown University supports a website that has docu-
mented the names of nearly 1,200 hotels, boarding houses, and cottages
built in the Ulster, Sullivan, and southern Greene Counties. They have
also documented 849 bungalows. The Institute’s website provides extensive
contextual resources for researchers interested in the vibrant social history
that illuminates Scheinfeld’s collection. Each domicile structure or hotel
set the stage for its own unique clientele. Over generations, families and
friends from all walks of life gathered in extended social networks to share
fun and relax in the countryside. The rich diversity of Jewish culture and
tradition was celebrated and enjoyed in all corners of commercial life in the
Jewish Alps. The indelible memory of homemade delights shared in beau-
tiful surroundings is carefully preserved in each photo frame.
    There are 140 documented photographs presented in this volume.
Scheinfeld’s sites include Grossinger’s Catskill Resort and Hotel, the
Tamarack Hotel at Parksville and the Tamarack Lodge at Greenfield
Park, the Laurels Hotel and Country Club on Sackett Lake, the Palms
Country Club, Homowack Lodge, the Commodore Hotel, the Pines Hotel,
the Nevele Grand Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel and Country Club, and various
bungalow communities. Family photographs, period postcard advertise-
ments, and printed hotel memorabilia help create the juxtaposition of early
resorts with their contemporary state of ruin. Author and scholar Jenna
Joselit ably comments on Scheinfeld’s thoughtful focus on the remains of
these dilapidated sites to create detailed compositions that demonstrate the
powerful techniques of post-modern ruin photography. Throughout the
collection, artifacts of social life are highlighted against the backdrop of

516     ■ NEW YORK HISTORY

vacated spaces in varying states of dissolution and return to nature. Chairs,
playing cards and poker chips, a skewed music stand, unmade beds, a
telephone, a hanging light bulb, a notepad, a bowling ball, a pair of ice
skates—each abandoned item evokes a memory, whether real or imagined.
    It is noteworthy that Scheinfeld includes more than twenty-five pho-
tographs of swimming pools, both from early postcards and from on-site
indoor and outdoor facilities. One can only imagine the investments that
funded them. The cavernous remains of concrete and steel are elegant
reminders of water’s universal appeal as a place for social gatherings, ritual
cleansing, and spiritual rebirth. Rows of poolside chairs and tables still
clutter the resort landscape, preserving in photographic memory the deep
grace of lives fully shared in a community basking in the clear light of the
Catskill Mountains.
    And so it goes that yesterday’s song at twilight often serves as the pre-
lude to tomorrow’s opening refrain at dawn. The times changed with
air-conditioning and affordable travel to destinations all over the world.
Moms went to work, and ambitious youngsters used summer breaks for
educational enrichment in preparation for the rigors of advanced studies.
Nevertheless, today a new generation of entrepreneurs and niche shop-
keepers are venturing forth to explore the verdant expanses of the Catskill
Mountains, providing new and exciting venues for urban cuisine, the fine
arts, and weekend entertainment. Moreover, fresh talent is reviving the
Yiddish performing arts. The current production of Amerike—The Golden
Land, a musical by Moishe Rosenfeld and Zalmen Mlotek, sponsored by
the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, pays respect to a rising genera-
tion’s desire for continuity and participation in the magnificent legacy
of America’s Jewish traditions and multicultural identity. With that in
mind, Marisa Scheinfeld’s photographic collection offers assurance that the
Borscht Belt vacationlands will indeed remain a remarkable and enduring
memory waiting to be visited and explored for generations to come.
    A traveling exhibition of Marisa Scheinfeld’s photographs will be on
view at the New York State Museum in Albany from September 2019–
February 2020. All information regarding the exhibit will be posted on the
official website www.borschtbeltbook.com.