heir cavalier disregard for spiritual matters.
Szold’s was hardly the last word on the subject. Well into the 1890s, German Jewish women were publicly exhorted—often by one another—to keep up their guard on vacation, to comport themselves with “unobtrusive modesty,” and to eschew material and emotional excess at all costs. In 1895, for instance, Rosa Sonneschein’s newspaper, The American Jewess, featured an editorial, “The Jewess at Summer Resorts,” in which, characteristically, denunciation mingled with apologetics:
Our Jewish ladies will, as usual, form no inconsiderable contingent of the gay throngs on pleasure and recreation intent....Let them continually bear in mind that is it their bounden duty to so comport themselves in public, as to give the lie to those aspersions cast upon the entire race ... because of the forward, vulgar and pompous demeanor of a few individuals.
If a non-Jewish woman adorned herself with all manner of trinkets and “glittering gewgaws,” laughed boisterously, and treated waiters with undisguised contempt, she would have only herself to blame. “Let, however, Mrs. Abrahams indulge in the same offenses against the canons of good breeding and Jewish womanhood, en masse, must atone for her sins.”
To prevent the further proliferation of women like Mrs. Abrahams, the American Jewish community needed “social missionaries,” insisted Sonneschein. “We need Jewish women of wealth, who will make propaganda for a dignified simplicity of dress and speech, who by their example will teach the masses to maintain their dignity at hotels and watering places.” Warming to her subject, the magazine publisher asserted that the American Jewish community required “missionaries to teach the world that American Jews are the product of civilization.”
In the years following Sonneschein’s peroration, the vacation “habit” extended to virtually all segments of the American population, from the well-heeled dowager to the recently arrived working girl. “There are towns in this state, in the Catskill region, and along 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 a