A Summer In The Catskills

Byron Rutledge, a twenty-year-old university student from Queens, can't believe his good fortune when he stumbles upon summer work at a resort in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. Hired as a dishwasher, Byron is excited to spend his summer in the beautiful outdoors. But his expectations are quickly dashed when he encounters hellish working conditions, and is forced to live in a vermin-ridden bunkhouse with unbridled youths bent on doing drugs and alcohol. The picturesque mountains that surround the resort soon turn to concrete walls, and the tall pines seem to keep watch over him as sentry guards. Inevitably, Byron's unruly coworkers stir up trouble within the resort and with the townsfolk, with Byron finding himself caught in the middle. The story takes a Gothic turn as pressure mounts, triggering nightmares that nearly drive him to madness. Can he endure the summer's hardships by conquering his chimeras, or will he quit and return home? Rich in imagery and balanced with humorous dialogue, A Summer in the Catskills artfully depicts individual stories of desperation, tragedy, absurdity, and unhealed emotional wounds.

The story of the attempt to build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills, from the days of the ghetto to the rise and decline of the great resorts.

"An immersive setting with details of running a Catskillsresort in the 1950s (think Kellerman’s in Dirty Dancing) beautifully frame a story with plot twists and a cast of well-delineated characters."--Booklist A summer of fun at a Catskills resort comes to an abrupt end when a guest is found murdered, in this new 1950s set mystery series. It’s the summer of 1953, and Elizabeth Grady is settling into Haggerman’s Catskills Resort. As a vacation getaway, Haggerman’s is ideal, and although Elizabeth’s ostentatious but well-meaning mother is new to running the resort, Elizabeth is eager to help her organize the guests and the entertainment acts. But Elizabeth will have to resort to untested abilities if she wants to save her mother’s business. When a reclusive guest is found dead in a lake on the grounds, and a copy of The Communist Manifesto is found in his cabin, the local police chief is convinced that the man was a Russian spy. But Elizabeth isn’t so sure, and with the fate of the resort hanging in the balance, she’ll need to dodge red herrings, withstand the Red Scare, and catch a killer red-handed.

This volume provides for the first time a collection of writing that investigates the stories and struggles of survivors in the context of the Jewish resort culture of the Catskills, through new and existing works of fiction and memoir by writers who spent their youths there. It explores how vacationers, resort owners, and workers dealt with a horrific contradiction--the pleasure of their summer haven against the mass extermination of Jews throughout Europe. It also examines the character of Holocaust survivors in the Catskills: in what ways did they people find connection, resolution to conflict, and avenues to come together despite the experiences that set them apart? The book will be useful to those studying Jewish, American, or New York history, the Holocaust and Catskills legacy, United States immigration, American literature, and American culture. The focus on themes of nostalgia, humor, loss, and sexuality will draw general readers as well.

Daring resort manager Elizabeth Grady will need to think fast to bring a killer into the limelight in this charming 1950s set cozy mystery series. Famous director Elias Theropodous has chosen Haggerman’s Catskills Resort as a shooting location for his next film. It sounds glamorous to much of the staff, but resort manager Elizabeth Grady is less satisfied. Dealing with the ridiculous demands of the antagonistic director is bad enough, and his attempts to walk all over Elizabeth are making her feel like her position at the resort has been changed into a bit part. But when Elias is poisoned during a dinner at the resort, the future of the film and the resort itself are on the line. Between an aging movie star, a harried producer, and former victims of the deceased director’s wrath, Elizabeth has a full cast of suspects to examine, and she’ll need to investigate every lead to catch a killer.

Every year between 1920 and 1970, almost one million of New York City's Jewish population summered in the Catskills. Hundreds of thousands still do. While much has been written about grand hotels like Grossinger's and the Concord, little has appeared about the more modest bungalow colonies and kuchaleins ("cook for yourself" places) where more than 80 percent of Catskill visitors stayed.These were not glamorous places, and middle-class Jews today remember the colonies with either aversion or fondness. Irwin Richman's narrative, anecdotes, and photos recapture everything from the traffic jams leaving the city to the strategies for sneaking into the casinos of the big hotels. He brings to life the attitudes of the renters and the owners, the differences between the social activities and swimming pools advertised and what people actually received. He reminisces about the changing fashion of the guests and owners—everything that made summers memorable.The author remembers his boyhood: what it was like to spend summers outside the city, swimming in the Neversink, "noodling around," and helping with the bungalow operation, while Grandpa charged the tenants and acted as president of Congregation B'nai.

The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New York’s own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s, with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests “one-hundred percent restricted” accommodations (“Hebrews will knock vainly for admission”), a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients, sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . . Here are the gangsters (Jack “Legs” Diamond and Dutch Schultz, among them) who sought refuge in the Catskill Mountains, and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families, giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossinger’s, the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord, Brown’s Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel, and others—in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps, with their headliners from movies and radio (Phil Silvers, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, et al.), and others who learned their trade there, among them Moss Hart (who got his start organizing summer theatricals), Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Joan Rivers. Here is a nineteenth-century America turning away from England for its literary and artistic inspiration, finding it instead in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure-romances, which provided a pastoral history, describing the shift from a colonial to a nationalist mentality . . . and in the canvases of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, and others that caught the grandeur of the wilderness and that gave texture, color, and form to Irving’s and Cooper’s imaginings. Here are the entrepreneurs and financiers who saw the Catskills as a way to strike it rich, plundering the resources that had been likened to “creation,” the Catskills’ tanneries that supplied the boots and saddles for Union troops in the Civil War . . . and the bluestone quarries whose excavated rock became the curbs and streets of the fast-growing Eastern Seaboard. Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, the postcard was an extraordinarily popular means of communication. Many of the postcards produced during this "golden age," and even some from later years, can today be considered works of art. Postcard photographers traveled the length and breadth of the nation snapping photographs of busy street scenes, documenting local landmarks, and assembling crowds of local children only too happy to pose for a picture. These images, printed as postcards and sold in general stores and five and dimes across the country, survive as telling reminders of an important era in America's history. This fascinating new history of the Catskills of New York showcases more than two hundred of the best, most evocative vintage postcards available.