I moved there in 1945 at the age of 8 from Los Angeles, and still remember the day. I had seen postcards of the resort, naturally, but they had not prepared me for that first vision. Everything was, to my small eyes, unexpectedly grand: the large stucco main building, with its spacious lobbies and wood-paneled fireplaces; the dining room, the size of a football field.
\n2
\nIn a two-block radius stood three-story guest cottages surrounded by lily ponds, flagstone walkways and colorful gardens dotted with small signs that read, \"Please do not pick us. We bloom for your pleasure. Thank you, the flowers.\" People in uniforms scurried back and forth doing guests' biddings. The seeming confusion left me breathless.
\n3
\nI had no idea, for example, that all of the hotel's china, silverware and cooking stoves had to be specially kashered for this holiday. At Grossinger's, rather than go through the time-consuming ritual with the china, the kitchen steward used this as an excuse to purchase a new 2,000-plate set -- in the same old pattern, of course. His rationale was breakage during the previous year.
\n10
\nThere must have been 30 of us at the table, all elegantly dressed. Formal attire was de rigeur, and guests, many of whom were successful in the garment business, vied with one another for the most splendiferous outfits. It was the only evening at the hotel on which women wore their full-length mink coats to dinner.
\n14
\nEach table was set with all the Passover offerings: matza, bitter herbs, charoset, hard-boiled eggs in salted water -- all symbolizing different aspects of the days when Jews were slaves in Egypt. Wine was also central to the celebration.
\n16
\nThat first Grossinger's Passover, I was introduced by my colleagues to the dining-room pegboard. People who've been to resort hotels sometimes wonder how the maitre d' determines who is to sit with whom. In those days, he used a pegboard with as many circles as there were tables, with holes in the circle to represent guests. He then placed multicolored pegs -- blue for single males, yellow for couples, green for children and pink for single women -- in the appropriate circles.
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The information in this book helps to correct the incomplete impression and to analyze in detail the largest concentration of Jewish farmers in the United States -- in the Catskill Montains in New York State.
\nxi
\nFrom earliest Jewish history, the Hebrews were portrayed as pastoral people. Most of the patriarchs were herdsmen, pasturing their sheep and cattle. The Torah, especially Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, repeatedly refers to Jews herding and tilling, both activities underscored by references to solumn pastoral holidays. Passover (Pesach) starting wheat harvests, Pentecosts (Shabouth) closing that harvest seven weeks later, and Succoth coming in the fall and celebrating the harvest of other crops, illustrate the importance of agriculture in Jewish holidays
\n1
\nFrom 1880 to 1914, about two million Eastern European Jews -- one third of the region's Jews -- migrated: 158,000 in the 1880s, 314,000 in the 1890s, 945,000 from 1900 to 1909, and 499,000 from 1910 through 1914. The migration ceased during World War I, then resumed after the war for several years on a small scale before being stopped in 1924 by anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic immigration restrictions.
\nAbout 2,378,000 Jews came to the United States between 1880 and the end of 1924. During this period, the Jewish population increased from 280,000 out of 50 million to 4 million out of 115 million.
\nIn the 1880s 25% of the Eastern European Jews returned to Eastern Europe. By 1908, only about 8% returned, and after 1919, less than 1%
\n\"mostly poor small-town shtetl-dwellers; smaller numbers came from large cities such as Odessa, Russia, and Lodz, Poland.\" -
\nPortrayed in Fiddler on the Roof
\n3
\nMoses Rischin noted that \"conditions became almost unbearable in the summer months. Bred in colder and dryer climates, tenement inhabitants writhed in the dull heat.\"
\nRischin, Moses. The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870-1914. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
\n4
\nSephardic Jews had been prominent in the founding of Tammany Hall in 1794, a hundred years later Tammany Hall food baskets rarely appeared on Orchard Street doorsteps. By this later date, Tammany did not consider Rosh Hashanah as important as Christmas, did not respect kashruth (kosher requirements), and did not like the old coutry cloths, alien language, and alien religion of the Eastern European Jews.
\n5
\nNew Pilgrimage appears to be the first actual Jewish farming settement in the United States.But the hot climate, disease caused it to fail.
\n10
\nAm Olam was founded in Odessa in 1881 by two utopian idealists. Mania Bakl and Moses Herder. It called for the settling of Jews on socialist communal farms in the United States.
\n\"Our motto is a return to agriculture, and our aim the physical and spiritual rehabilitation of our people. In free America where many people live closely in peache and amity, we Jews, too, shall find a place to lay our heads; we shall demonstrate to the world that we are capable of manual labor.\"
\n14
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What a strange idea, my parents amid these many hundreds of very ordinary people thinking they could run simple hotels in the Catskills. Not much business experience, precious little capital, and a reliance on relatives, friends, and landsmen (coresidents of one's European hometown) who would accept shared baths and cramped rooms.
\n\"In the Catskills, Jews could become Americanized while preserving much of their Jewishness...
\n\"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.\"
\n\n
A million people each summer by the 1950s and 1960s
\nIn 1997 I wrote a short story, \"the Make-Believe Hotel\" about a girl wandering in the ruins of the River Walk Hotel (a name I made up, though it sounds loike several other real names) in South Fallsburgh. In her imagination she revives the hotel, including its famous River Walk, lined with Japanese lanterns. ...
\nWell, in October of 200, Julius Merl called me up. His parents owned the Ambassador Hotel on Route 42, a hotel they built up from its 1910 origins as the Gamble Farm, then the Cedar Inn, and in 1921 renamed the Ambassador. That year they built the Japanese Gardens, lined with kerosene-burning Japanese lanterns that cast their spell on the guests as they walked across a bridge to a small island in the Neversink where they were entertained. I was struck by the deja vu of this experience, though it was perhaps not so unique. I feel sure, though, that I can conjure up anything about the Catskills legacy and then find out it really was that way.
\nThis was the Yiddish Promenade, the boulevard of the Jews, along which you approached the main house, whose unique Catskills design smiled and beckoned you into an oversized home full of warmth and activity.
\n16-17
\n\n
\"personal Summer Eden.\"
\n17
\nThe Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society found that by 1908 there were 684 Jewish farms in New York State, 500 of them in Sullivan and Ulster counties...
\nSullivan and Ulster counties had three tenths or more of all the Jewish farmer households in the United States around 1911.
\n30
\nFew of the Jews came with the skills needed to farm successfully. In the century before the mass migration began, there was great movement in Eastern Europe from villages to towns to cities... Fewer than 5% of Eastern European Jews were farmers... The society noted in this time period [of the early 1900s] that one of its problems was that the vast majority of Jewish immigrants, who comprised nearly all of the Jewish farming community, had little or no farming experience.\"
\n\n
31
\nThe famous Kutscher brothers came to Sullivan County in 1907, because one of the brothers was frail and thought country living would be healthy. Like many other Jewish farmers, they took in summer boarders in order to help meet their expenses. Kutscher's country club would later become one of the Catskills' major resorts.
\n32-33
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\n\"I learned never to envy money,\" she said. \"I saw the way some of the rich people I met there conducted themselves. I never bought into the myth that you had to be rich to be happy. I disliked those who were condescending and treated the staff like servants.\"
\n\n
I remember being excited about a woman who was getting married when I was only 10. My mother asked me why I was so excited about it. I told her, 'because then she can go sleep with the lifeguards That's what all ladies do when they get married, don't they?' I became aware of a lot of things at an early stage.\"
\n\n
\"The Jewish experience in the Catskills is part of Americana,\" she explains. \"There's nostalgia for a seemingly simpler time. Guests didn't have BlackBerries, they had blueberries. The only time they got on line was to wait for the dining room to open.\"
\nGrossinger's Hotel was forced to shut down during a time that many reier to as 'the death of the Catskills.' According to Grossinger, the hotel first opened as a country dub for Jews who were being discriminated against.
\n\"In the 1960s, there was no more discrimination,\" she said, adding that jet travel and cruise ships became competitors to hotels. \"Another obstacle was women's liberation,\" she continued. \"In the beginning, young women went to Grossinger's to M in love. As time went on, women realized they didn't need to come.\"
\nGrossinger also pointed out that people became more health conscious and the huge meals at Grossingers (in her book, Grossing counts the weekly food orders that induded 1,000 pounds of poultry, 300 ribs of beef, 75 cases of eggs, 1,000 pounds of potatoes, and 700 pounds of coffee) soon went out of style.
\n\n
And in the end, Grossinger, who witnessed the rise and fall of an iconic hotel from the inside, writes: \"I've never quite agreed with those who say you can't go home again. On the contrary, I spent more time wondering, if you can really leave. I've lived in the same apartment in Greenwich Village for over 40 years, but when I think of home, it was and will always be Grossinger's.\"
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2012-10-25T17:07:41Z", "dateModified": "2012-10-25T19:00:52Z" } }, { "key": "A3WNT35J", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 102570, "name": "Catskills Research", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/catskills_research", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/102570/items/A3WNT35J", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/catskills_research/items/A3WNT35J", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/102570/items/PUE5FGC5", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 73838, "username": "haeber", "name": "Jonathan Haeber", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/haeber", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "A3WNT35J", "version": 1, "parentItem": "PUE5FGC5", "itemType": "note", "note": "In the last decade, the Borscht Belt went out as a secular Jewish vacationland, but it's in as an academic area. Scholars are burrowing in the rubble of \"the Mountains,\" carving out niches. Sociologists, social historians, anthropologists, folklorists, ethnographers and professors of American, Jewish and Yiddish studies write monographs and memoris, create curricula and film documentaries, curate exhibitions and lecture about everything from farming to tummling to shlockhouse dynamics.
\n\"Catskills studies\" occupies a place \"between history and nostalgia, the scholarly and the popular,\" said Phil Brown, 49, the sociology professor at Brown who co-founded the Catskills Institute four years ago with Shalom Goldman, a Middle East studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta.
\n\"The Catskills was narishkeyt,\" Rabbi Hertzberg said in a telephone interview. \"It produced a fair amount of all that is vulgar in American Jewish life, but the scholarly study of it as a form of acculturation, of group living, and what happens to an immigrant community in its summer hangouts\" might yield valuable insights.
\nA Catskills Institute Archive will house the institute's collection of artifacts and documents at the American Jewish Historical Society in the Center for Jewish History being built on West 17th Street. (Attention, Mountain pack-rats! Every menu and swizzle stick is significant.)
\nThe Adirondacks and environs, often considered the Un-Catskills, had a Jewish summer world, too. Peddlers traded with landsmen and loggers, teachers spent their vacations camping out and German-Jewish financiers roughed it, albeit with full staffs, in \"elaborately rusticated camps,\" said Amy Godine, a social historian and writer, speaking at the conference.
\nVERYIMP
\nWhen Joseph Seligman, who financed the Union in the Civil War, was turned away from the Grand Union hotel in Saratoga Springs in 1877, and hotels farther north aped its anti-Semitic policies, German Jews built their own resorts and children's camps in the wilderness.
\nAt camps like Schroon Lake, founded by Rabbi Isaac Moses of New York's Central Synagogue, overprotected city boys were subjected to the rigors of nature and an army-style regimentation that would prepare them to be \"captains of industry.\" Such camps, Godine suggested, were \"finishing schools for the last touches of assimilation.\"
\n/VERYIMP
\nPolitically progressive Jews encouraged interracial cooperation and helped found a local branch of the NAACP, but the black laundresses, chamber maids, kitchen workers, busboys, waiters, plumbers and in some cases chefs skilled in cooking kosher specialties, who were indispensable contributors to the booming resort empire, have been relegated to the margins rather than the center of its history.
\nVERYIMP
\nThe point is to record all names, stories and numbers. In the glory years, there were 935 hotels in Ulster and Sullivan counties -- almost double an earlier estimate of 500. (The list is posted at the conference, like a synagogue memorial board.) Fewer than 10 are still in business. Grine Felder was abandoned a few years ago, its library left to rot. The Pines was just sold to Orthodox developers for condo conversion and the Aladdin to a chasidic charity. The Concord may be sold to Touro College, an Orthodox institution.
\nThe flavor of the Mountains is still Jewish but mostly ultra-Orthodox. \"The Catskills had been a central vehicle for Jews of Eastern European descent to become Americanized while remaining Jewish,\" Brown writes in \"Catskill Culture.\" For the ultra-Orthodox, the Catskills are a rural enclave, a haven away from American secular influences. \"I would expect people to study the ultra-Orthodox's recycling of the Catskills,\" Brown said.
\n/VERYIMP
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1892 brochure for Ulster and Delaware:
\n\"\"summer is the most enticing season in the country, and the most repulsive and unendurable in the city. Business is dull then, and there is little excuse for remaining in town. Your wife is sick and tired of society and town gayety, the children long for the annual romp amid the green hills and valleys... The whole family is gasping for fresh air and the country. The demon Malaria threatens if you tarry, and hte risk of delay is dangerous to assume... Then, after a month or two of real country life, they return with renewed courage and vigor.\"
\n\n
78
\n\"These hotels invited the guest to \"imagine that he is the owner o a great estate. [or beside] a lake in Switzerland.\"
\nBoarding Houses:
\n\"Those who were clerks, salaried managers, shopkeepers, or young professionals often came for two weeks at a time, paying the $6.00 to $12.00 per week which roughly equaled a week's salary. In contrast, Mohonk bill came to just over $1,500, well over a year's salary for many farmhouse guests.
\nwomen who were the wives and mothers of the new urban white-collar class, and teachers and clergy who encouraged temperanc.e
\nGuests numbered 70,000 a season in 1883 and 400,000 a season by 1906.
\n79
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Seekers after health are invited to try the effect of the pure water the clear fresh invigorating air of our mountain towns It has often succeeded where medicines have failed
\n21
\n\n
MIDDLESEX Here will be found no traces of city life and only those Temples created in the beginning
\npage 59
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This was the West Coast premiere of the musical \"Grossinger's-- The Last Resort,\" in a concert reading, without sets, that had actors with scripts in hand. The L.A. Jewish Symphony, on its casual, Broadway-esque behavior, proved to be a very fine pit band, though it actually performed on stage.
\nA standing-room-only house was on hand, and, in shtick tradition, was even treated to a comedic warmup act.
\nImprov impresario Bud Freeman and funny men Shelley Berman, Kenny Ellis and Fred Travalena swapped wisecracks and reminisced about the resort, which helped establish the reputation of the Catskills as an incubator for American comedy culture.
\nVERYIMP
\nA sense that, as one of the refrains intones, \"It was an innocent time, a fabulous place.\"
\n/VERYIMP
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Workers living at Grossinger's said they hoped they would be able to stay. ''A lot of people don't have money,'' said Gerard Hofmann, a waiter for 15 years who is living on the grounds. ''They don't have anywhere to go.''
\n3
\nMany families have been coming to Grossinger's for Passover ''practically for generations,'' Mr. Davis said. ''We cannot and will not interfere with their holidays.''
\n4
\nGrossinger's was purchased last November for $9 million by a group of investors, Grossinger's Associates. Mr. Davis is the general counsel for the Island Planning Corporation of America, which represents the investors.
\n9
\nWhen it bought the hotel, the group of investors said it planned a $4 million renovation of the resort and would break ground this spring on the first of as many as 2,000 town-house condominiums. At that time, they said they would not close the resort for the renovations.
\n10
\nThe union has obtained a temporary restraining order to prevent employees who live on the grounds of Grossinger's from being forced to leave while the issue is pending in State Supreme Court in Monticello. Union officials have argued that many workers, if they were forced to leave, would be homeless.
\n12
\nWorkers who lived in dormitories on hotel grounds - about 150 of the total of more than 500 - had housing and meal costs deducted from their salaries while the hotel was open. Traditionally, the workers said, they were allowed to stay in their rooms during closings, which usually lasted no more three weeks and occurred during the slow winter season. At those times, they were not paid, and they were not charged for their rooms. They had to provide their own meals.
\n13
\n\n
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Kutscher's \"Country Club\"
\n1
\n\n
\"The closeness of those times. The guests were actually you houseguests. It was like having a relative over for dinner.\"
\nRobert Towers (1)
\n\n
The men, who were farmers, would leave their wives and children on the farm for the winter. They'd go to the city, take any job that was available, and come back whenever they could... The lucky ones made contacts in the city and brought people up to summer in the country. Mothers would move children to outer housing, and the rest o the family would sleep wherever they could. The bed of the farmer and his wife would be given over to boarders. That's how the early people made a living. It was a survival net, a day-to-day thing for many of them.
\nBill Smith (pages 2-3)
\n\n
Life back then was very hard. My grandfather and father dug cellars and sold firewood -- anything to stay afloat. In the winters my father worked in an umbrella factory in New York City. For years the people from the umbrella factory came up as guests.
\n... \"Mt. Meenahga was restricted to Gentiles and catered to the carriage trade.\" - Julie Slutsky
\n4
\nMy parents... came from Russia and Poland, and my father worked as a designer of men's clothing in New York City. My mother used to tell us how she would put her baby in the carriage outside, and the cinders from the elevated trains would fall all over it. She kept asking my father to get her a place in the country.
\nMy father read an advertisement in the Jewish newspaper about farms for sale in Monticello... They named the place the Beauty Maple House, and it opened for business in 1904. ...
\nVERIMP
\nI still remember seeing signs in Ferndale that said, \"JEWS NOTALLOWED.\" And nobody ever threw the signs down.
\nEsther Strassberg (6)
\n\"There was anti-Semitism in the area; Jews were in the minority. Yet there was ambivalence because the Gentiles made a lot of money from the resort trade...
\nThere was really no other place to go for vacations, because so many places were restricted. We were in the catskills, and they felt comfortable there. We were in the Catskills because my father had tuberculosis, and the area with higher elevation had a reputation for TB cures .
\nArthur Shulman (6)
\n\n
My father, Sam, was six years old in 1906, when he came up to Parksville with his father, a hat maker from New York City, who suffered from TB. .. The town of Liberty was known for its sanitariums, including the famous Loomis and Workmen's Circle sanitariums. Naturally, the hotels didn't want the stigma of anything connected to TB, so they distanced themselves from the Liberty Post Office.\"
\nFred Gasthalter (6-7)
\nThey were born in Minsk, Russia, but had lived in New York since 1885. Pop was visiting some friends in Woodridge and thought it was healthier up there than in New York -- the air was clean and good.
\nDave Levinson 8
\n\n
VERYIMP
\nMy mother's family came to teh United States around 1910 from a section of Poland that was then part of the Austrian empire. They settled in New York City, and tried to make a living in the needle trade, and then they opened a restaurant. But they were farmers and wanted to get out into the country. They thought about Connecticut but ended up in Ferndale, New York, because a very orthodox community was there already and they felt more comfortable.
\nPaul Grossinger28
\nThe Grossinger Kosher Farm of 1914 grossed $81 from nine guests, each of whom stayed a week. But the next year so many people they stayed in tents scattered around the property.
\n30
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\n\"Dedicatd to the Wandering Well-to-Do of Chicago who Seek Country Places.\"
\n\"Printed under the auspices of the Lake Geneva Villa Association\"
\n1898
\n\n
Foreword
\nThe immense growth of large cities in the last twenty five years and the great increase in the number of wealthy or well to do citizens therein have increased the desire for country places for summer use To escape the smoke heat and bad air of modern cities people who can in the summer at least go to the country The suburbs are not sufficient They lack in the genuine country surroundings they are often absorbed finally into the great cities they lack the real charm of country life Moreover it is the fashion from June to October to go to the country Hotel life has proved too crowded too public too inconvenient and not home like Hotel life outside the cities is being superseded to a large extent by the Country Club or the Golf Club house But the Country Home whether the modest Swiss cottage or the magnificent Vanderbilt palace at Asheville accentuates the idea of one's own exclusive castle for the summer sojourn This little brochure is offered to City people to illustrate and portray the beautiful Lake Geneva the gem of Wisconsin the Newport as well as the Lenox of the West and the ideal locality for Country Places
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\nVERYIMP
\nSUMMER EXCURSIONS No matter how large the contingent of excur sionisfs to Europe may be in summer the millions of weary business men and recreation seeking families of America are not only contented with the magnificent health promising spots which their own country affords but revel in the unexcelled beauty and grandeur of scenery at their very doors The Rhine and Alps are fully replaced by the Hudson River with its matchless shores and the beauteous Catskills One need only turn over the leaves of the elegant book just issued by the WEST SHORE RAILROAD to find that there is a wealth of choice places to select from The Homes and Tours as the book published by the West Shore Railroad is titled is a magnificent volume as rich in beautiful illustrations as it is stocked full of information of the many places that can be reached and that afford all the rare pleasure that one seeks in a summer ramble The covers of the book in themselves gems of art faithful reproductions of Mr Charles Graham's famous water colors are an excellent introduction to the gems found between the two covers Obtain the book and you will have no embarrassment to pick out a romantic route or hit upon the ideal spot you were looking for
\nj-=---
\n131 - 132
\nIt is the only road having uninterrupted railway connection between the seaside resorts of New Jersey and the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains Saratoga and the Thousand Islands Send eight cents in stamps to HB Jagoe Gen l East n Pass Agent West Shore RR 303 Broadway NY and obtain the beautifully illustrated book Summer Homes which contains over 3000 summer hotels and boarding houses in the Catskill Mountains and Northern New York
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\nIt was embraced by New Yorkers who wanted to breathe some fresh air for awhile and had the reputation for treating the guests like family. Entertainment and over-abundance of food was their hallmark. “How do you lose weight at Grossinger’s? Go home.” The show, produced by June Sattler and cleverly directed by Susan Morgenstern, is a gem, filled with heart and humor. Go, laugh a little, it couldn’t hurt
\n/VERYIMP
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\nBut vacation habits changed, with the advent of jet travel, air-conditioning and country clubs. Single people, more and more, preferred the Hamptons and Fire Island to the Catskills and Grossinger's. ''Nothing is the way it was,'' Mr. Grossinger said philosophically.
\n''Going to Grossinger's was the height, the epitome, of everything,'' said one longtime guest, Geri Simon, from the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. ''There were swingers here in those days. My girlfriend and I used to close the bar at 3 A.M.''
\nPeople like Miss Simon are overwhelmed by memories the moment they step inside the wood-paneled dining hall that seats 1,700, or walk along the corridors that are lined with glossy photographs of such celebrity guests as Eleanor Roosevelt, Judy Garland, Irving Berlin, Rocky Marciano, Roberta Peters, Zero Mostel and Milton Berle.
\nThe Phillipses, who were there this weekend from Miami Beach, remembered one electric summer when their son Charles, who grew up to be an orthopedist, managed the swimming pool. ''He saw the romance between Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor take place,'' Mrs. Phillips said. ''He saw them walking hand in hand around the pool in the afternoons when everyone else was at lunch. He said she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.''
\nStill presiding over the most important room in the entire resort, the dining hall, is Bill Goldwasser, who started as a busboy in 1943. Mr. Goldwasser grows impatient with all the talk about the past, and how much grander it was.
\n''People want everything to remain the status quo, exactly as it was,'' he said. ''They say, 'Can I sit with Georgia the waitress?' I say, 'I'm sorry, Georgia passed away.' She has a right to die.''
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\nThe major factors in the creation of the Catskills as a summer resort were the unrestricted waves of immigration from Germany, Russia and Poland in the 19th century. America was the destination for five million Jews, many of whom settled on the Lower East Side while longing for relief from the squalor both in their homes and in the sweatshops where they toiled.
\nSome managed to escape to the mountains, where they bought small farms. But farming was not their forte, and soon the farms became boarding houses, then inns and bungalow colonies for visitors from the city.
\nThe comedian Joey Adams, who wrote a book on the Borscht Belt, is frequently mentioned in ''A Summer World,'' but Mr. Kanfer does not tell Mr. Adams's story of his own name change. Some years after getting his start in the mountains, he confessed to having been born Abramowitz and changing his name to Adams when he went into show business. While on a club date in Boston he was approached by Wendell Adams, a member of the fine old New England family, who jokingly inquired if they might be related. ''I don't know,'' Joey replied. ''What was your name before you changed it?'' The queen of the mountains was the soft-spoken and regal Jennie Grossinger, and she is featured throughout Mr. Kanfer's book. Her parents, Selig and Malke Grossinger, had purchased a small plot of land before World War I with a down payment of $450. In the years to follow, Jennie became the region's best-known hostess, her hotel the most imitated.
\n/VERYIMP
\nThe guests, however, insisted on entertainment from the Catskills bonifaces, and by the 1920's, Mr. Kanfer shows, what started as an extra added attraction had become a major undertaking. Waiters and busboys were pressed into service as tummlers (the comedians and would-be comedians who were so important to the emergence of a Catskills brand of comedy), while the social directors became impresarios.
\nIn telling the story of the Catskills, Mr. Kanfer has tied together history, religion and show business into an entertaining compendium. But despite his book's subtitle, he need not worry about the area's decline. The Catskills innkeepers are a resourceful group. Years ago when they were in trouble, they drummed up fall and winter weekday business with conventions and trade shows. Today, they hope that the New York State Legislature will grant them casino gambling. If the lawmakers comply, there will unquestionably be many more chapters to be written on the history of the Borscht Belt.
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\n1
\n\"It was fascinating to see how devoted they were to this landscape and to this experience,\" he said, in reference to the large Orthodox leisure culture in the Swiss Grisons. In fact, kosher resorts in places like Davos attract religious Jews from all over the world.
\n6
\nFinally, contemporary Jewish tourism is displayed inside a sukkah, whose rooflessness represents the connection between earth and heaven.
\nIn the end, Loewy returns to his Orthodox Jews vacationing in the Swiss Alps. \"As Jews, we live in a polycentric world, with many important places. The top of an Alpine mountain can be an experience of Zion,\" he said.
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", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2012-10-25T17:07:41Z", "dateModified": "2012-10-25T17:07:41Z" } }, { "key": "R9NJDD6Z", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 102570, "name": "Catskills Research", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/catskills_research", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/102570/items/R9NJDD6Z", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/catskills_research/items/R9NJDD6Z", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/102570/items/CWTFZ9EP", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 73838, "username": "haeber", "name": "Jonathan Haeber", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/haeber", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "R9NJDD6Z", "version": 1, "parentItem": "CWTFZ9EP", "itemType": "note", "note": "Grossinger's, the sprawling Catskills resort that became emblematic of the borscht-belt brand of humor and, especially at mealtimes, of Oscar Wilde's credo that nothing succeeds like excess, is being sold by the family that founded it in a seven-room farmhouse 71 years ago.
\nVERYIMP
\n''We're going to be creating a spa-type resort, more of a yuppie-type of facility, while keeping the grace and charm of the old Grossinger's,'' Glenn Chwatt, one of the investors, said yesterday. ''We'll have a gourmet dining room for weight-watchers with a separate kitchen, so that if you walk to the left you're sure to lose 10 pounds and if you turn to the right you're sure to gain 10.''
\nGrossinger's was more than just another place to go on vacation, however. For years, it also was a barometer of taste and social values.
\nIn the author William Manchester's narrative history of America, ''The Glory and the Dream,'' the first ''Singles Only'' weekend held at Grossinger's was listed among the great events of 1962 - followed in his chronology by John Glenn's space flight and the Cuban missile crisis.
\nJennie Grossinger, the founder's gentle daughter who also lent her name to a brand of sour-rye bread, presided over a dynasty that ruled an area more than twice the size of Monaco and which the writer Damon Runyon once described as ''Lindy's with trees.''
\nNearly half of the roughly 100,000 guests at Grossinger's each year have been there before.
\n''There are people coming now with their grandchildren,'' said Jennie Grossinger's daughter, Elaine Etess, ''and their grandchildren are playing with my grandchildren.''
\nyet Mrs. Etess estimated that the proportion of Jewish guests, while still high, had declined to about 80 percent and to about 50 percent of those attending conventions.
\nThe hotel is managed by a fourth-generation Grossinger - Mitchell, one of Mrs. Etess's sons. Another son, Mark, is a vice president of the Golden Nugget hotel and casino in Atlantic City.
\n/VERYIMP
\nGrossinger's has been losing money recently, the family said - a projected $1.8 million this year alone, according to draft documents filed by the investors with the State Attorney General's office.
\nBusiness executives and public officials say the Catskill hotel industry has stabilized after suffering sharp declines as a result of various competitive pressures. These include the ease and economy of air travel, the proliferation of summer homes, the legalization of casino gambling in Atlantic City and a trend toward more frequent but shorter vacations.
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