{"id":88065,"date":"2021-08-28T17:05:04","date_gmt":"2021-08-28T15:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=88065"},"modified":"2021-08-20T07:42:40","modified_gmt":"2021-08-20T05:42:40","slug":"05-05-66","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=88065","title":{"rendered":"Yiddish in the Catskills"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Yiddish in the Catskills<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nROKHL KAFRISSEN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Rokhl\u2019s Golden City: Why attention must be paid to the history of the Borscht Belt<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

A Disneyland with knishes.\u201d That\u2019s how Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler wryly described the Catskills he found on a 1965 visit for Holiday<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span>, a magazine dedicated to \u201ccivilized entertainment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The area was alternately known as the Sour Cream Sierras<\/a><\/strong><\/span> and the Jewish Alps in its heyday; today there is only the Borscht Belt (of blessed memory). More than a geographic locale, the Borscht Belt \u201csignified a loose confederation of some thousand Catskill Mountain resorts, named for the Eastern European Jewish clientele who filled the rooms with laughter and rumor, wandered the greenery, searched for mates, and consumed four Lucullan meals a day, including a midnight snack.\u201d That\u2019s Stefan Kanfer\u2019s description in A Summer World<\/em>, his 1989 history of the Jewish Catskills. \u201cIn between, they cheered the tummlers<\/em>, a Yiddish word for the manic, all-purpose entertainers who were the mainsprings of these resorts.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That image of the Catskills persists today: a shrieking, shpritzing, fressing, Jews-only paradise (and antisemite\u2019s nightmare), where mating was pursued with the kind of collective single-mindedness to make a salmon pause upstream in admiration. With some degree of ambivalence, Richler called the hotel guests \u201csitting ducks for satire.\u201d Weren\u2019t these Jews simply living the American dream of abundance and security?, he wondered. In any case, he assured us, hotel guests had a sense of humor about themselves. Whatever you might say about them, they had already said, loudly, and worse.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Jewish Catskills experienced a decline in the 1960s, hurt by the ubiquity of television, air conditioning, cheap airfare, and the curse of social mobility. (Not to mention that hotels in other regions that had once proudly closed their doors to Jews were now legally prohibited from doing so.) But before that, the Borscht Belt was more than a place, it was a densely populated world of its own, an engine of American Jewish culture, producing an astounding array of comic talent and shaping American comedy for decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

Richler notes that at a big hotel like Grossinger\u2019s (\u201cthe G\u201d), you could expect to be entertained by top-shelf TV comics: \u201cThey reveal the authentic joke behind the bland story they had to tell on TV because Yiddish punchlines do not make for happy Nielsen ratings.\u201d At Grossinger\u2019s, making it in America sounded like a comic at home with Yiddish punchlines, and the laughter of the audiences that craved hearing them.<\/span><\/p>\n

But not every hotel was Grossinger\u2019s, and things sounded very different when shrieks of laughter were replaced by defiant silence. Kanfer recounts the experience of Joan Rivers, who cut her teeth as a young comic in the Catskills, and whose audiences she called \u201cthe worst in the world.\u201d Guests didn\u2019t pay for entertainment, and felt at total liberty to express their disdain. But the worst of the worst, according to Rivers, was \u201cthe Benz Hotel where nobody spoke English and the interpreter onstage repeated everything I said in Yiddish \u2026 Every line bombed twice.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

At Grossinger\u2019s, the sound of Yiddish was a secret handshake, something that connected comic and audience in a mostly English-language milieu. What happened at the Benz, however, points to a very different genre of Jewish presence in the Catskills, one that resisted translation.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the late 1930s, for example, a group of families established a new bungalow colony where Yiddish would be the language of high culture, not punch lines. Novelist Martin Boris<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>describes the Grine Felder<\/em> (Green Fields) colony as \u201csummer home to the most concentrated assemblage of Yiddishist elite anywhere on Earth.\u201d Opera, classical music, literature, and drama were important activities, and children were an integral part of that cultural life. Those who wanted to summer at Grine Felder<\/em> first had to be \u201cevaluated by the cultural committee as to his or her possible contribution to the various cultural activities going on.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the idealism of the organizers, they still had to contend with material realities. Yiddish theater in New York was in a period of decline. Director Zygmunt Salkin met that depressing reality with an absurd plan. He took I.L. Peretz\u2019s play Bay nakht afn altn mark<\/em> (At Night in the Old Marketplace) and created a new English translation. He then dragged his friend I.B. Singer up to Grine Felder<\/em> to oversee the staging of the (previously considered to be unstageable) play.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the end of the summer of 1938, the play had come together. It still failed to find a theatrical home in New York\u2019s shrinking Yiddish theater scene. Those who could transition to the mainstream American stage were doing so, with the husband and wife acting team Joseph Buloff and Luba Kadison among them. Buloff was successful enough that he would originate the role of Ali Hakim<\/a> when Oklahoma!<\/em> premiered on Broadway in 1943.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite his success, Buloff never abandoned the Yiddish stage. With Kadison, he created a Yiddish adaptation of the play that shook the foundations of American theater at midcentury, Arthur Miller\u2019s Death of a Salesman<\/em>. Salesman <\/em>premiered in 1949, and Miller personally kept tight control over subsequent stagings and adaptations, with one notable exception. In her fascinating essay \u201cAttention Must Be Paid: Death of a Salesman\u2019s<\/em> Counter-Adapted Yiddish Homecoming,\u201d historian Debra Caplan tells the amazing story of how Buloff and Kadison simply walked around Miller\u2019s many stipulations (along the way, premiering their Yiddish Toyt fun a seylsman<\/em> in Argentina) and even gained his enthusiastic consent for their successful Brooklyn production of Toyt fun a seylsman<\/em> in 1951.<\/span><\/p>\n

After the triumph of their Death of a Salesman<\/em> adaptation, Buloff found quite a bit of work in American television, getting roles on Ben Casey<\/em>, Naked City<\/em>, and other shows. But what interests me most is his 1954 summertime arc on the extraordinarily long-lived sitcom The Goldbergs<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over seven episodes in the summer of 1954, Buloff played Mr. Pincus, owner of Pincus Pines, the hotel where Molly and Jake Goldberg bring their family for a Catskills holiday. The episodes themselves aren\u2019t terribly interesting. And that\u2019s not surprising. In 1956, Gertrude Berg (herself the daughter of Catskills hoteliers) told Commentary<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

You see, darling \u2026 I don\u2019t bring up anything that will bother people. That\u2019s very important. Unions, politics, fundraising, Zionism, socialism, inter-group relations, I don\u2019t stress them. … After all, aren\u2019t such things secondary to daily family living? The Goldbergs are not defensive about their Jewishness or especially aware of it. … I like to keep things average. … I don\u2019t want to lose friends. (Quoted in Donald Weber\u2019s 1998 article \u201cTaking Jewish American Popular Culture Seriously: The Yinglish Worlds of Gertrude Berg, Milton Berle, and Mickey Katz.\u201d)<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI like to keep things average\u201d isn\u2019t exactly the kind of credo from which timeless art emerges. But that wasn\u2019t the point. For its legions of viewers, The Goldbergs<\/em> was comfort viewing, a heymish (but not too<\/em> heymish<\/em>) example of an average American family that just happened to be Jewish.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Pincus Pines episodes touch on familiar Catskills tropes: quality of the dining room food, distribution of tips among the hotel staff, romantic intrigue among young singles, romantic intrigue among old marrieds, and gossiping on the porch. (You can even catch the elegant Luba Kadison as one of the gossiping women in this episode<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span>)<\/span><\/p>\n

But what I really love about this arc is getting to see a legendary performer like Joseph Buloff in action. Just watch him enter the Goldberg\u2019s apartment for the first time in this episode. The man had presence.<\/span><\/p>\n

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