6th Annual History of the Catskills Conference August 25 - 27, 2000 Kutsher's Country Club Monticello, New York

Schedule of Events Friday, August 25 6:00-7:00pm Cocktail Party for Conference Participants

8:30-10:00pm Phil Brown: Intro & Welcome to the Conference, History & Future of the Catskills Helen Kutsher: “Greetings from a Veteran Hotelkeeper” Mark Kutsher: “The Future of the Catskills” Marge Schneider, Catskill Resort Group: “The Redevelopment of the Concord and the re-emergence of Sullivan County as a Destination Resort”

Saturday, August 26 10:00-11:15am Terry Kay: Reading from his 1994 novel Shadow Song, set in the northern Catskills

11:30am-12:45pm Sidney Offit: Reading from his novel He Had It Made, a 1959 novel set at the Aladdin Hotel, just republished in 1999

2:15-3:30pm Tania Grossinger: Reading from Growing up at Grossingers and talking about growing up as a "staff kid"

4:00-5:15pm Henry Foner & Larry Rivkin: “Chester's Zunbarg: A Focal Point of Progressive Culture in the Catskills”

8:30-9:45pm Irwin Richman, Penn State: “Catskill Color: A View through Postcards”

Sunday, August 27 10:00-11:15am Jack Landman: “Sports in the Catskills”

11:30am-12:45pm Arthur Tanney: “Bungalow Stories”

Room rates and reservations: call Kutsher's Country Club at (914) 794-600 or (800) 431-1273; or write at Kutsher's Country Club, Monticello, NY 12701

Conference Fees (half price for CI members) Full Conference Single Day Single Event $50 $25 $10 Catskills Institute: Box 1916, Brown University, Providence RI 02912; [email protected]

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“Kitchen Lit” By Martha Mendelsohn The Jewish Week: September 1, 2000

The "mountains" evoke marathon meals rather than literary salons, but writers whose books are set in the borscht belt served up verbal schmaltz spiked with cynicism at Kutsher's Country Club last weekend.

Sidney Offit, author of the 1959 novel "He Had It Made," hoped to do comedy shtick when he reported for work at his mother-in-law's Catskill resort, the Aladdin Hotel, almost 50 summers ago. "An hour-and-a-half later I was in the kitchen."

When Offit, the new food steward, failed to order enough "specials" (jumbo frankfurters), a deprived guest went wild. "There was nothing to prepare me for the savagery we were attacked with when we ran out of things," Offit told the audience at the sixth annual History of the Catskills Conference.

The first draft of his novel about a scheming waiter, reissued by Beckam Publications last year, lacked a key ingredient: a love interest. Offit added an affair with the boss's daughter. (In real life, Offit had eloped with the daughter of the proprietor of the Aladdin Hotel the year before.) Offit's book remains "the best account of dining room and kitchen life ever written," said the conference organizer, Phil Brown, author of "Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area" and a sociology professor at Brown University, whose mother was a hotel chef.

Terry Kay, author of "Shadow Song," a 1994 novel about a Georgia farmboy-turned-busboy who falls for a Jewish guest during the summer of '55, experienced "only one kiss in three years" of waiting tables in the mountains, but he fell in love with the food. He used some of his earnings to fly his mother up for a meal.

At lunch, Norma Bernstock, 54, a conference participant and photographer from New Jersey, dug into the kasha varnishkes. She spent childhood summers at a Monticello bungalow colony. "I had to eat in the children's dining room," she groaned, as hotel guests, from old-timers with walkers and first-timers in strollers, descended on Kutsher's massive dining room.

Out of respect for her family, Tania Grossinger refrained from dishing all the dirt when she wrote her 1975 memoir, "Growing Up at Grossinger's." Had the book been either a straight "puff piece" or "the inside story," it might have been a best-seller, she said.

"Never straddle the fence!" cautioned Grossinger, who just wrote a novel, "Magda's Daughter," which is partly set in the Catskills.

And don't skimp on the "specials."

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"Scholars Seek Borscht Belt's Meaning" August 27, 2000 By Annemarie Schuetz The Times Herald-Record [email protected]

MONTICELLO: At this weekend's History of the Catskills Conference, organizers work to preserve and understand a period of the Catskills that some would like to forget.

When the interest strikes, Phil Brown and Alan Barrish get in a car and drive around Sullivan County, looking for history.

It's everywhere here: weathered gateposts, ruins of hotels covered with overgrowth, a single stone wall surrounded by trees. Inside the former hotels, they sometimes find dishes, shreds of furniture, maybe a plastic bingo card.

Small but important things, Brown says, "relics of what was the most vibrant resort culture that ever lived." For Brown, a sociologist at Brown University, this is the archaeology of memory. He and Barrish, both former waiters in Catskills hotels, and a handful of other scholars have become preservers of the Borscht Belt through their Catskills Institute, which is holding its sixth-annual History of the Catskills Conference this weekend at Kutsher's Resort. The institute chronicles the impact of the Borscht Belt on American Jews and on American culture in general.

The hotels ruled Sullivan County for decades, bringing in hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jewish people from New York City, who sought shelter from blistering city summers in the shade of the Catskills. For the visitors, it was a time of bingo, famous entertainers, lounging and plenty of food. For the locals, it was jobs: waiting tables or baby-sitting. It's a past that some would like to forget.

"I hear about it pretty often," said Barrish, the director of the E.B. Crawford Library in Monticello. "Some people, including Jews, want to bury the Borscht Belt."

"There was some residue of anti-Semitism," Brown said. "And there were so many hundreds of resorts, they brought people up here, took over the local swimming holes. Some thought too much went to the hotels Now, they look around and see this place is full of ruins."

"People want to get away from that (hotel culture); it's too ethnic, they say," Barrish said. "But I tell them that this is what made this area unique. Take the Jews out of this area, and we're no different from any other rural area."

The focus is not so much on bringing the resort industry back, Barrish said; it's on looking at it from the perspective of history. "This is how the Jews assimilated, how they became American. We want to learn how it shaped our culture."

“It's nostalgia," said Ted Shuster, who came to the conference with his wife, Ruth, from their home on Long Island. Ruth Shuster grew up in Liberty. Her father, Rabbi Israel Lebendiger, conducted seders at Grossinger's Resort. "I have ties here," she said. "It's an important part of our past."

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