dult 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 gamesters, the frivolous and the giddy,” the communal press urged Jewish pleasure-seekers to cultivate their intellect as well as their sensations. Women often bore the brunt of such public exhortations. Time and again, the prospect of idle Jewish women sporting red lacquered nails and flimsy, though expensive, summer dresses greatly troubled the community’s cultural custodians. In 1922, for example, the Froyen Zhurnal, a popular Yiddish women’s magazine of the period, encouraged its female readers to be “intelligent vacationers.” “Think twice before going into any undue expenditures,” the paper cautioned, recommending that working women plan carefully for their much awaited vacations, especially in planning their wardrobes. “Girls, remember, please ... that to be rigged out in fine style,” one doesn’t need much, just one or two skirts, two dress blouses, two “dressy gowns,” a wide-brimmed hat, and a sweater. “Rest assured, you girls, who have to rely upon a limited wardrobe during your vacation, that the woman who has gone on vacation with her trunks full of elaborate clothes will not find contentment and pleasure if she will have to rely wholly upon her clothes for that.”
In addition to sartorial advice, the community’s cultural arbiters dispensed a different kind of wisdom, suggesting that women spend their summers “wisely.” Attend lectures, read “good books,” and engage in good deeds, they were told. After all, recommended the Hadassah News Letter in 1927, “psychologically, a summer resort is a superb setting for disseminating Hadassah knowledge. The necessarily constant companionship of the resorts and the leisureliness of vacationing create just the right atmosphere for conversation and exchange of ideas.”
Despite such entreaties, Jewish daughters seemed to delight in the pursuit of pleasure, much to the disappointment and consternation of communal leaders such as Dora R. Spiegel, president of the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism. Writing in 1934, Spiegel fulminated against those women who “talked sma