A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills, from the Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt - Hardcover

Kanfer, Stefan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374271801 ISBN 13: 9780374271800

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

With a dearth of analysis and a surfeit of nostalgic name-dropping, this Catskill Mountain history by the author of A Journal of the Plague Years has the effervescence of seltzer gone flat. Early Jewish peddlers and farmers tried to eke out livings in the mountains, but, by the 20th century, Jewish resort owners flourished--touting fresh air and serving co-religionists spurned by gentile establishments. Yiddish superstar Boris Thomashevsky initiated entertainment in the region when he brought a troupe of actors to vacation with him. Later, singers like Eddie Fisher and Jan Peerce were launched there. Satirized by Jewish and secular newspapers, as well as by their own self-abnegating comedians, the Jewish Catskills became a symbol of bourgeois bad taste vis-a-vis food, sex, fashion, spouse hunting and social climbing. Today, once posh resorts now in decline have become condominiums, or serve nonkosher food to woo gentiles.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

In 1899 the first Jewish boarding house in the Catskill Mountains opened to replace a failed farm, starting the successive flood of rooming houses, summer cottages, and resorts like Grossinger's and the Concord. Kanfer accurately evokes images of abundant kosher food, constant entertainment epitomized by the Borscht Belt comedians, and husband-hunting romance among the pines. He uses a variety of primary and secondary sources to document the Jewish presence in the Catskills and particularly the rise and fall of a specific era of vacationing, capturing the sense of loss during the latest transition to condos. This is an excellent chronicle of one facet of the Catskill Mountain's history. Recommended for large public and academic libraries.
- Susan Hamburger, Virginia State Lib . & Archives, Richmond
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0374271801
• ISBN 13: 9780374271800
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400