	THE CATSKILLS INSTITUTE
	An Organization to Promote Research and Education on the Significance of the Catskill Mountains for American Jewish Life

The Providence Journal

January 28, 1996
by Martha Smith

Letting out the Borscht Belt

Ex-busboy seeks memorabilia to document importance of Catskills culture

During summers in the Catskills, Phil Brown did pretty much everything: busboy, waiter, bartender, occasional lounge pianist.

"My parents owned a small hotel in White Lake," says Brown, now a sociology professor at Brown University. "I was born there and lived there until 1971. I started working full time when I was 13. It was fun: I hated it while I was doing it but I also loved it. It was hard work but great money. You could earn $1,000 to $1,500 for the summer -- and the romance element was a big factor. It was the experience of being a young adult on your own, working."

So it makes sense that Brown, 47, is one of four scholars leading the creation of the Catskills Institute dedicated to studying the Borscht Belt, that upstate New York region that became a summer playground for Jewish families and also spawned a generation of musicians and comics hired to entertain them.

Momentum for founding the Catskills Institute grew from the first History of the Borscht Belt conference held in Woodridge, N.Y, last Labor Day.

"There were 500 hotels during the heyday of the Borscht Belt, from the 1950s to the '70s," says Brown, who notes that Herman Wouk's novel, Marjorie Morningstar, set in the Catskills, gave the rest of the world a peek at this idyllic haven. "Up to a million people went there each summer."

The migration to the mountains had started before the turn of the century, but really picked up speed in the 1920s when small hotels and boarding houses sprang up. Then came the Great Depression, when nobody could afford a vacation; after World War II, people had money again and something to celebrate.

Today, there are only about two dozen hotels left, but Brown and his colleagues are determined to capture and record that moment in the history of American society. They're busy conducting interviews and soliciting memorabilia and other artifacts. They plan to conduct conferences, produce a newsletter, hook up to the Internet, write books and organize a speaker's bureau.

Their effort, says Brown, is part of a resurgence of interest in Jewish culture that is evidenced by the risking popularity of Klezmer music, Jewish studies, Jewish books and the teaching of Yiddish as a language.

Many of the richest qualities of Jewish life and tradition, he believes, were self-consciously put aside by people desperate to fit in. "It was part of the process of assimilation into the culture," he says. "The Catskills resort area declined because it was seen as "too Jewish, to old world, too stereotypical." It was brash and Woody Allen-like.

"But people are rediscovering it for the same reasons that the Holocaust is being re-examined: they realized that huge chunks of the Jewish culture were missing. They're saying, 'Hey, there's all this good stuff!'"

'A real swank place'

Among the myriad summer employees was Sam Sherman, 81, of Woonsocket, who spent two summers after World War II playing the trombone in hotel bands. His first assignment was Scaron Manor, on a lake near the Canadian border.

"It was a real swank place," says Sherman, who notes that the band played for afternoon tea as well as evening dancing and shows. There was a troupe of young ballerinas on the bill -- he still has snapshots of them in bathing costume -- and college basketball stars who played exhibition games against schoolboy athletes from other hotels.

"We had a Spanish vocalist and a sax player who'd worked with Paul Whiteman." He also ran into a second-rate comic and part-time trumpet player named Gary Morton, who would go on to marry Lucille Ball after her split from Desi Arnaz. "To this day," says Sherman, shaking his head, "I can't imagine how he got hooked up with this woman who was so far ahead of him."

The following year he worked at the Nemerson in South Falsberg, playing in a 10-piece band that included 18-year-old Cy Coleman, who would go on to write, among other classics, the Broadway musical Sweet Charity. "He was writing songs even then," says Sherman. "He was a great piano player, but we'd say, 'Cy, you keep your mouth shut and listen to us older guys.' He knew more than all of us!"

Those days, he says, were "the real fun part of my life." In fact, it's when he met his future wife, Shirley, who was 18 and working as a waitress to pay her way through Hunter College.

"When she served the bank," says Sherman, grinning, "I got a bigger piece of pie."

Calling all memories

Phil Brown says the process of researching the Borscht Belt has been both nostalgic and cathartic.

"I traced my roots to the places I had stayed and worked at -- I had stayed with my parents at 5 or 6 places and worked at another 8 or 10.

"About four years ago I was telling funny Catskills summer stories to a friend and he thought it was great and I should write a book. A few months later my mother died and, all of a sudden, at 44, I was an orphan. [The research] was partly a search for myself and my roots."

Contributions to the effort have been enthusiastic and researchers have put out a call for more. A man who is a third-generation owner of a family lumber company in the Catskills has donated a large number of original bills from the hotels. A New York rabbi has given personal papers. The owners of the Morningside are gleaning articles of interest.

Many people, like Sam Sherman, are supplying memories. And more donations will surely arise from a second Borscht Belt conference to be held in August in the Catskills.

"Our fantasy," says Brown, "is the exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York City."

Anyone who vacationed or worked in the Catskills and is interested in sharing memories or artifacts should contact the Catskills Institute, c/o Phil Brown, Department of Sociology, Brown University, Box 1916, Providence, RI 02912, or phone 863-2367.

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