BOOK REVIEW : A Look at the Borscht Belt

A Summer World: The Jewish Experience in the Catskill Mountains From 1753 to the Sunset of the Borscht Belt by Stefan Kanfer (Farrar Straus Giroux: $22.95, 308 pps.)

In 1913, a couple of Jewish refugees from Galicia were able to purchase a farmstead in the Catskill mountains with the encouragement of the Jewish Agricultural Society. “At last the caricatures of Shylock and Fagin could be replaced by portraits of the poor and honest plowman,” Stefan Kanfer explains in “A Summer World.” But Selig and Malke Grossinger promptly opened their farm to boarders from the big city, and their names soon came to epitomize the collection of opulent Jewish resorts that was later called “the Borscht Belt.”

“A Summer World” is Kanfer’s ambitious social history of Jewish life and culture in the Catskill mountains of southeastern New York. Kanfer traces Jewish settlement in the Catskills to 1773, when someone known only as “Jacob the Jew” first appeared in the land records. By 1837, the Catskills were the site of earnest but failed efforts to establish a Jewish commune. But it was not until the turn of the century, when farms and boarding houses began to dress themselves up as resorts to attract Jewish customers from the streets of New York, that the Catskills became what Kanfer calls “a trove, a sanctuary, and a joke.”

Kanfer, author of “A Journal of the Plague Years” and “The Eighth Sin,” ranges over the whole of Jewish life in America in “A Summer World.” He gives us a vivid rendering of New York in the early decades of the 20th Century, when the Lower East Side--glutted with recent arrivals from Russian and Eastern Europe--was more densely populated than Bombay. He describes the richness and vitality of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish press, the struggles of the Jewish labor movement, the exploits of Jewish gangsters, the persistent affliction of anti-Semitism, the strivings of a whole generation of Jewish immigrants--and he usually manages to show how these dreams and anxieties of Jewish life were manifested in the cultural hothouse of the Catskills.

For example, Kanfer describes how Boris Thomashevsky, an early superstar of the Yiddish stage in New York City, built a palatial retreat in the Catskills--and thereby “initiated the Catskill convention of non-stop entertainment.” According to Kanfer, one repercussion of the tragic Triangle Fire--a sweatshop fire that symbolized the dangerous working conditions of non-union factories--was the establishment of “Hope House,” a workers’ retreat in the Catskills. And the darker side of Jewish life in America reached the Catskills when racketeers started fixing the basketball games that were one of the peculiar institutions of the Borscht Belt resorts.

Kanfer is in a scholarly rather than a celebratory mood in “A Summer World,” but he writes with authority and affection about the folkways and rituals of the Borscht Belt--the lavish kosher meals, the elaborate social hierarchies, the protocol of love and courtship: “I FOUND A HUSBAND AT THE WALDEMERE,” one hotel advertised on its billboards. Of course, the glory of the Catskills was the sheer excess of the resorts themselves, and Kanfer allows us to see the real and enduring influence of the Borscht Belt in the American popular culture and especially the entertainment industry. Several generations of American entertainers and impresarios, ranging from George Jessel to Joan Rivers, learned their trade in the Catskills, and the legacy can still be found in Hollywood and Las Vegas.

Indeed, a certain style of manic improvisational humor can be traced to a peculiar institution of the Catskills--the tummler , a unique all-purpose entertainer and master-of-ceremonies who literally ran the show at the Catskills resorts. Danny Kaye served an apprenticeship as a tummler , and so did Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis. “References to the Mountains were to be found, uncredited, in (Danny Kaye’s) fluid and manic movements, his metronomic delivery, and in his sudden mastery of foreign tongues,” Kanfer explains. “(Sid Caesar’s) headlong mimicry was the tummler’s heritage, a mix of chutzpah and the urge to please.”

“A Summer World” is, after all, a fitting homage to a half-forgotten place and time where a colorful patch of the American tapestry was created. Today, as Kanfer reminds us, the Borscht Belt is mostly gone, a victim of profound changes in taste and style within the American Jewish community. “Seems like it’s all slipping away,” the resort owner complains in the last scene of “Dirty Dancing,” a recent motion picture that offers a glimpse of the Catskills in decline. Grossinger’s was torn down in 1986, and the new owners intend to build condos in its place; among all the veterans of the Borscht Belt, only an aging Eddie Fisher bothered to attend the ceremonies.

“As he reminisced, a young photographer . . . asked a colleague to identify the speaker, once the most popular singer in America,” Kanfer writes. “ ‘Carrie Fisher’s father,’ she was informed.”