ll talk all day long between food, drink, mah jong and golf and judged all others by the clothes they wore.” Though these women “eschew all talk of politics and books lest they be thought bores, they like to think of themselves as the cream of Jewish society.” “Perhaps they were,” Spiegel acidly concluded, “but the cream has turned rancid.”
American Jewry’s leading literary lights felt much the same way. Taking aim at the apparent ease with which so many Jewish daughters took to the good life, Jewish writers produced some of the harshest critiques of American leisure culture ever published. Take, for example, editor and writer Abraham Cahan’s wrenching tale of deracination, The Rise of David Levinsky, in which forty pages are given over to depicting the social machinations and sartorial aspirations of largely female vacationers at a fictitious Catskill resort. Saturday dinner “was not merely a meal. It was, in addition, or chiefly, a great social function and a gown contest.” Bediamonded and bedecked, young women were “powdered and painted. Prosperity was rapidly breaking the chains of American Puritanism, rapidly ‘Frenchifying’ the country and the East Side was quick to fall in line.” Belletrist Maurice Samuel was equally scathing. In his 1925 poem, “Al Harei Catskill,” published in the high-toned Menorah Journal, he mocked the mindlessness of Catskill culture.
And here in Catskill what do Jews believe? In Kosher, certainly; in Shabbas, less ... in charity and in America. But most of all in Pinochle and Poker, in dancing and in Jazz, in risqué stories and everything that’s smart and up-to-date.
In the Catskills and other summer retreats, the prospect of romance loomed large, inflaming passions and roiling the search for quiet. “Our seashore pastimes are becoming artificialized and complicated and straining,” observed Brooklyn rabbi Alexander Lyons in 1915, referring to such popular resort towns as Arverne and Long Branch. “They are becoming too extensively fashionable parade places and ... matrimonial marts.” Much the same could be said of many of the adult summer camps that sprang up during the interwar period to provide affordable vacations for single men and women in their twenties. While some adult camps like Boiberik, Lakeland, and Unity House, the ILGWU-sponsored facility, stressed their educational programming (and their older, married clientele), others, such as Camp Utopia in the Poconos or the fictitious South Wind popularized in Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar, seemed entirely given over to personal fulfillment. “Part of that vacation at camp had as its goal sex on the part of the boys and marriage on the part of the girls,” reminisced Moss Hart, who in the 1920s served as Camp Utopia’s social director. “It was a game of endless variations—a stately minuet of lying and pretense,” which often crescendoed into marriage.
Having found a mate, many married people, ironically enough, found themselves without one for much of the summer. By and large, gainfully employed middle-class and working-class men of the prewar era could not afford to take a lengthy vacation. Sending their wives and children off to the country for an entire summer, the men joined their families only on weekends, arriving with great fanfare on the Friday evening or Saturday afternoon train—the so-called husband train—and leaving in a more subdued fashion on Sunday night. In their absence, Jewish leisure society was, de facto, a gendered affair. By the sea or in the mountains, at the grandest hotel or in the most modest kochalein, women and children dominated the scene.
Other vacation spots, like those maintained by the Jewish Working Girls’ Vacation Society, practiced a deliberate form of gender segregation. Established in 1892 by Esther Jane Ruskay and Selina Greenbaum on the model of the “unsectarian” Working Girls Vacation Society, the New York organization provided affordable vacations for those least likely to afford them: single, working Jewish women. For three dollars a week, milliners, stenographers, and machine workers—over on