Memoir of a Catskill Hotelkeeper


Book Description

Gonifs, tumlers, fressers, along with a cast of waiters, busboys, chambermaids, chefs, counselors, gardeners, dishwashers, musicians and even family-Carrie Komito encounters them all in more than a half century of presiding over a thriving Borscht Belt hotel. In this collection of stories, she shares with readers her memories, often touching and ironic, but always-always filled with the humor and vitality that characterized that now historic era.




Memories of a Catskill Hotelkeeper


Book Description

Gonifs, tumlers, fressers, along with a cast of waiters, busboys, chambermaids, chefs, counselors, gardeners, dishwashers, musicians and even family-Carrie Komito encounters them all in a more than a half century of presiding over a thriving Borscht Belt. In this collection of stories, she shares with readers her memories, often touching and ironic, but always filled with the humor and vitality that characterized that now historic era.




New York Hotel Experience


Book Description

For more than two hundred years hotels have played a significant role in American history. The modern hotel is even an American invention. In five case studies of iconic New York hotels, this book presents the hotel experience of the white upper class, literati, young artists, African Americans and Jewish Americans in the twentieth century. Using a variety of texts, including autobiographies, movies and novels, the impact of hotel experience on society and culture - which has been neglected until now - becomes apparent. This unique approach offers a new way of reading New York and helps to better understand the city's special dynamics.




In the Catskills


Book Description

“A nostalgic pastiche of fiction, memoir, photography, art, postcards, menus, etc., celebrating Jewish resort life in the Catskills.”—Providence Journal With selections ranging from literature to song lyrics, this book highlights the Catskills experience over a century, and assesses its continuing impact on American music, comedy, food, culture, and religion. It features selections from such fiction writers as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Herman Wouk, Allegra Goodman and Vivian Gornick; and original contributions from historians, sociologists, and scholars of American and Jewish culture that trace the history of the region, the rise of hotels and bungalow colonies, the wonderful flavors of food and entertainment, and distinctive forms of Jewish religion found in the Mountains. What was life—the work, the play, the food, the romance—like at Catskills Mountains resorts? These very personal recollections capture the special sense of community and freedom that developed among Jewish families leaving the city behind for a summer vacation and enjoying a cultural space of their own. From “Bingo by the Bungalow” by Thane Rosenbaum to “Young Workers in the Hotels” by Phil Brown to “Shoot the Shtrudel to Me Yudel” by Henry Foner, this charming anthology captures an era that has had enormous impact on the Jewish experience and American culture as a whole. “A warm, charming, and valuable work. Much of the writing is simply gorgeous.”—Contemporary Sociology




The Catskills Alive!


Book Description

Less than a day's drive from New York City, Boston or Philadelphia, the Catskills have long been a popular weekend and summer retreat for city folk. The area offers fine accommodations, top-notch dining and spectacular surroundings. This book profiles hundreds of hotels and restaurants, with an emphasis on the very best places. Daytime activities - shopping, antique-hunting and more - are featured.




Catskill Hotels


Book Description

At one time, according to the Catskill Institute, there were more than a thousand hotels spread across the mountains of Greene, Ulster, Delaware, and Sullivan Counties. The Catskills were an exciting world full of pleasures to be enjoyed, with summer and winter activities characterized by entertainment, food, sports, card playing, and food again. Catskill Hotels, with a collection of some two hundred images, tells the story of this world, which began with America's first resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House, continued with places such as the world-famous Grossinger's, and can still be found today at Kutsher's Country Club, the Mountain House at Lake Mohonk, and a few other hardy resorts.




Making Mountains


Book Description

For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences. Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water. The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation. In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.




Catskill Culture


Book Description




Congress Monthly


Book Description




Borscht Belt Bungalows


Book Description

A history memoir and photo album of Jewish summers in the Catskills.




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