Borscht Belt Bungalows [Hardcover]

Irwin Richman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 22, 1998

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 per cent 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. Author note: Irwin Richman, Professor of American Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg and author of Catskills, NY, has spent at least part of every summer of his life in the Catskills. Richman grew up in the bungalow colony business. His parents Alexander and Bertha owned a small colony, and his grandfather Abraham was in the mortgage business. From an early age Irwin went along on the detailed site visits to other colonies that were made prior to granting loans. He also worked as a counselor and as a camp director at their large colonies.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

For more than half a century, until about 1970, legions of middle-class Jewish workers and businessmen moved their families each summer from crowded New York quarters to Catskill bungalow colonies and communal settlements known as kuchaleins (literally: ``cook alones''). This is the colorful but hitherto scanted kuchalein story. Richman's (American Studies and History/Penn. State Univ.) family owned and managed a typical colony during the heyday of the bungalows. He fondly recounts seemingly everything about the business. Mothers and the kids would occupy the rustic mountain dwellings for ``the season'' (July Fourth to Labor Day) and fathers would appear, frequently burdened with provisions, for the weekends. (The provisions were often considered contraband because the owners, playing ``farmer,'' sold produce to the captive guests.) The story is knowingly presented from the point of view of the landlord, traditionally depicted as a penny-pinching villain, but here naturally presented in fuller dimensions. Along with business matters, there is much about traditional cuisine and amateur theatricals, kids' frolics, water and sewer arrangements, swimming in the Neversink, daily routines, and holiday practices. Particulars abound regarding sneaking into the grand hotels nearby or fishing for trout with rye bread for bait. There are descriptions of artifacts like cow flop, ice cream frappes, and flypaper. Richman's style is simple and direct. The text turns a tad wistful as he describes the scene today, dominated by coops with Hasidim and the newly Orthodox. Sure, the old days were halcyon, but the unrelenting sifting through the detail is like sitting in a schvitz (a sweat lodge with a Yiddish accent) with a genial but garrulous old uncle blessed with total recall. A pleasant Borscht Belt memoir, much like a Borscht Belt meal: excessive beyond nourishment, but hey, why not try a little? (62 b&w photos, not seen) (For the grander side of life in the Catskills, see Richard Grossinger's Out of Babylon, p. 1622.) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

"There are very few people who could do such a fine job of recapturing for us the remarkable world of the Catskill bungalow colonies." --Phil Brown, Brown University "Richman delights the reader, not only with portraits of the people who rented the bungalows, but with the activities that occupied their time. He tells us of the small time entertainers who often began their careers in the mountain hotels and casinos and more often than not, ended their entertainment careers there too...well worth reading and, for some of us, evok[ing] long forgotten, pleasant memories." --Jewish Journal "Richman's style is simple and direct...A pleasant Borscht Belt memoir, much like a Borscht Belt meal: excessive beyond nourishment, but hey, why not try a little?" --Kirkus Reviews "A Jewish-American pastoral? Thoreau in the Catskills? Irwin Richman's marvelous Borscht Belt Bungalows is as much a literary work--a retrospect of country summers, now history--as a scholarly study...Let no reader of this lively first-person narrative be deceived that this is just a reminiscence, without scholarly depth. Richman collected an amazing range of information on Borscht Belt life and gracefully folds it into his memories." --Anne C. Rose, Pennsylvania History "Richman is particularly suited to give us this historical overview, as a professor of American studies and history and as one who has made the pilgrimage to the mountains nearly every summer of his life, first to the bungalow colony of his grandparents and later as an employee at similar establishments. ...Richman is nostalgically superb in his recall of the importance of these annual gatherings in the communal context of an immigrant people, liberally quoting from fiction and nonfiction writings on this era and this place." --Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 207 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press (January 22, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566395852
• ISBN-13: 978-1566395854
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #895,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Knishes! Hot knishes for sale! My wife wants a bungalow!", September 15, 2008

By 

J. H. Minde "Everything I need is right here" (Boca Raton, Florida and Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Borscht Belt Bungalows: Memoirs Of Catskill Summers (Paperback)

Springtime in Brooklyn, circa 1966, was punctuated by the gruff call of Ruby The Knish Man (a minor celebrity in Brooklyn and in this book), who sold legendary hot potato knishes smothered in kosher salt from a pushcart which would magically appear anywhere you were in Brooklyn or in "the country," that area of the Catskill Mountains of lower upstate New York usually referred to as the Borscht Belt and characterized by bungalow colonies.

Bungalow colonies have been slighted in the histories. Large resorts, such as Grossinger's, are extensively documented, and the careers of Borscht Belt comedians and other stage performers, are the stories of rising stars. But most of New York City's Jewish population (and the Borscht Belt was almost exclusively Jewish) could not afford an entire summer away at a large resort; they chose rather, to rent bungalows. A bungalow can be charitably described as a summerhouse, and less charitably described as a shack. Which it was depended largely on the bungalow colony where you rented.

Irwin Richman, whose family owned a bungalow colony in Woodbourne, New York, has written an exhaustive, chatty history of the bungalow colony business, which had its beginnings in the Ninteen-teens, but really only came into its own with the general prosperity of the 1950s. For the next twenty years, the annual migration of Jews from the Five Boroughs to the relatively rustic towns of Ulster and Sullivan Counties topped one million per summer.

Bungalow colonies were resorts of last resort. Mothers and children typically stayed away from home all summer long, with fathers coming up on weekends and during vacation weeks.

Entertainment was scarce and primitive: A man with a movie projector, several cans of films, and a portable screen would set up weekly in the "casino," a large, rambling building sometimes containing a few chairs, a pinball machine, ping pong tables, and bingo paraphernalia. Card games were ubiquitous. Occasionally, a singer or comedian either from the large resorts, or not talented enough for the large resorts, would perform. There was always a pool, not always in the best of shape. TV reception was poor and snowy, since the mountains and distance interfered with the broadcast signals from New York.

Mothers cleaned and cooked and played mah-jongg, and were single parents five days a week. The outside world seemed far away. Cars (usually only one per family in those days) stayed behind in the city with fathers so they could go to work. Food shopping was a family outing left for weekends. So many bungalow colonies had just one pay telephone for all the residents. Jars of change were helpful, but calls, both outgoing and incoming, were rare (and announced over the colony's PA: "Mrs. Minde, you have a call from your sister!"). In the bungalows, where one bedroom was often shared by parents and children and where walls were paper thin, privacy was more a matter of mutual disregard than self-containment. A bungalow colony was also a mosquito's idea of a luncheonette.

Yet, so many of us (including me) who spent summers there remember bungalow colonies fondly. They were countrified, particularly in comparison with our neighborhoods at home. Parents seemed more relaxed and tolerant in the clearer, cleaner air of the mountains. Kids roamed freely and safely, having spectacular adventures in the woods, catching butterflies and frogs and salamanders and fireflies in jars, picking blueberries, and running from snakes as fast as possible. Trees. There were trees. And lots of grass. Barbecues were a common form of meal preparation. Mornings in the mountains were often chilly, and I can remember my father lighting the stove in the predawn half-darkness to heat our little house, the sweet smell of the propane still a comforting memory. Stars seemed to jump out of the sky at night. Ice cream was particularly cold in the country, glass soda bottles needed an opener in those days, baseball games were best experienced on the radio, you made new friends in minutes, and it was a time that had come and gone before we even knew that what we were seeing was vanishing before our very eyes.

As Richman points out, bungalow colonies still remain, now primarily the preserve of Orthodox Jews who maintain traditional forms of behavior. It seems proper that they still sustain a bungalow colony culture, after so many of us have moved away from it.

Bungalow colonies ended for us much as Brooklyn ended for us, when we city dwellers moved to Long Island. In the green spaces of the suburbs, the need to get away was less pressing, and bungalow colonies suffered from suburbanization since so much of what motivated bungalow colony life was that need. In the light of suburbia, bungalow colonies took on a ratty, disreputable air in memory, and those summers were rarely recalled with much affection, particularly by women, who cooked, cleaned and kept house, it all being very much like being at home. As travel costs dropped and the world shrank, a winter trip to the Bahamas became less expensive and far more appealing than a summer in a bungalow, just as a trip to Las Vegas trumped a trip to the Tamarack Lodge.

Today, with cable and satellite TV, cell phones, iPhones, computers, fax machines, and X-boxes, the relative remoteness of bungalow colonies, one hundred miles from home, seems unbelievable, but, as Irwin Richman tells us, it was a simpler, gentler, and more stable world. Passing Yankee Stadium on Memorial Day. Passing Yankee Stadium on Labor Day. Birds and bugs. Milk "from Dellwood with love." Flypaper. Blow-up liferings in the shape of seamonsters for swimming, and still more change for the phone. Splintery Adirondack chairs. And Daddy, driving up in the '60 Chevy convertible in the middle of the night because I had a 104-degree fever. He made it from Brooklyn to Monticello, a two hour drive, in 45 minutes.

Some things you never forget. Thanks Dad.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrific first-hand account., March 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Borscht Belt Bungalows (Hardcover)

Mr. Richman tells a story that only he could tell.His humorous, nostalgic account of the Catskill's golden era and its decline is one worth reading.