the seashore whose summer population is made up almost entirely of East Siders,” observed a writer for the American Israelite in 1903, contemplating the recent democratization of leisure. “A Sunday afternoon spent on the boardwalk at Arverne or on Ocean Avenue, Long Branch or Bath Beach, will attest to the truth of this statement. It would seem that the entire East Side has closed up home and shop and has gone to the seashore.”
Preferring to spend vacations in the company of their own kind rather than run a gauntlet of disapproving gentiles, Eastern European Jewish immigrants created a summer world of boardinghouses, bungalows, inns, and “exclusive” hotels populated entirely by Jews. In some instances, would-be farmers played host to guests from the city. An article entitled “A Voice from the Ghetto,” in the August 1903 pages of the American Hebrew, made this wry observation:
For eight months in the year [the Jewish farmer] is forgotten ... but with the oncoming of the summer, a host of friends appear on the scene.... These friends are not unlike friends everywhere. They like to visit you at your summer home and dine with you, and some of them bring their baggage along with them for an extended stay.
Soon, quite a number of enterprising farmers began to charge their guests a modest fee for room and board. “In this way,” concluded “A Voice from the Ghetto,” the farmer “entertains his friends at no loss to himself.”
While vacationers fancied farm life, others made do with the kochalein [literally, “cook for yourself”], one of the most inventive and affordable of summer institutions. “For about sixty dollars for the season, which could last from Memorial Day to Chanukah if one wished, each family had had a sleeping room, cooking and food storage privileges in a communal kitchen with half a dozen wood stoves and ... tomatoes, cucumbers and string beans from the garden,” wrote Jack Luria, a veteran of many kochalein summers at Schaine’s boardinghouse. A delight for children, the shared living arrangements could fray adult nerves and give rise to daily quarrels as too many women fought to use too few stoves. Luria quoted his mother as saying, “If you had cooked a summer in Schaine’s kitchen, you need not fear the tortures of Gehennom [hell] in the world to come.”
For those more concerned with keeping up appearances than with saving money, nothing less than a “first-class” hotel would suffice. Observed one student of immigrant social mores:
Social climbing demands it.... One cannot do without it and still maintain the respect of one’s friends. One would fall considerably if it were known that he or she had not gone to Tannersville, or Hunter, or Arverne ... especially if one happened to belong to the fair sex.
To satisfy the demand for accommmodation, Jewish businessmen purchased or assumed control of existing luxury hotels. “Now Under Jewish Management,” announced the Grossmans, the new owners of the luxurious Pavilion Hotel in 1927. Our hotel
benefit[s] a new American people and a new generation. The ballroom, where the Vanderbilts, Goulds and Astors danced to soft music their dainty minuets and ancient waltzes, will now see Jewish youths and maidens gyrating to jazz. The dining hall that rang to the tune of Yankee Doodle will resound now to the Hatikvo. Dark eyes flashing with Oriental fire will gaze from the porch of that aristocratic hotel.
As they sat, gazing, on the veranda or rowed on the lake or dressed for dinner, Eastern European Jews and their children gave themselves over completely to the “gospel of relaxation.” “We are all talking and thinking and dreaming of our vacation,” they told a reporter for the Tageblatt. With the first hint of spring, advertisements for the Ocean Spray Hotel, High View Villa, Clinton Farm House, and the Pleasure Lake House filled the pages of the Tageblatt and other American Jewish newspapers, fueling readers’ dreams. By midsummer, editorials urging vacationers to mind their manners and behave with restraint were just as frequent. Warning against the “indifferent parvenus, the reckless g