Back to the Catskills

Yaakov Maza was fired from Parksville’s Tanzville Hotel in 1955.He had been hired as the social director, a wide-ranging job that entailed organizing volleyball games and getting the guests dancing in the casino at night. Following that unsuccessful gig, he managed to find success at other hotels in the booming Borscht Belt, a meandering formerly Jewish Catskill Mountains resort area, mainly in Sullivan County, New York.

The sound of laughter, much of it rising from the routines of the innumerable comedians who began their careers in the Borscht Belt, was pervasive. Some of the comics were merely funny. Many were unique, world-class entertainers like Yaakov Maza, who had changed his name to Jackie Mason. He joined a brilliant crew of A-level Jewish jokesters like Sid Caesar, Danny Kaye, Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Woody Allen, Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, Red Buttons, and scores of others. And since most of the hotels offered entertainment, especially on Saturday nights, literally hundreds of performances were taking place simultaneously in the assorted hamlets and towns spanning the mountain hotels, places like Monticello, Loch Sheldrake, Liberty, the Fallsburgs, and our own tiny and well-loved village of Parksville.

One of my colleagues and I did not succeed in getting fired from that same Tanzville Hotel. Tips from his job as a waiter paid his college tuition. I, a 17-year-old day-camp counselor whose tips were substantially less than his, worked just as hard, but redemption was found when we got married a few years later. It was well known that the hotels of the Catskill Mountains were among the world’s greatest meet markets for young Jews. At least in those bygone days!

You may have noticed a phenomenon in contemporary American Jewish life, particularly on the East Coast, very particularly in the New York/New Jersey metro area. The Catskills, the Borscht Belt, is attempting to rise from the ashes. People are thinking of a reincarnated way to vacation, close to home, in lavish resorts, featuring delicious kosher food and a vast array of entertainment options, from all manner of sports to stand-up comedy. Bring back the halcyon days! Today it is only nostalgia, aspiration, and memories. But perhaps someday soon, we will see a new Catskills Colossus, stunning new hotels with a Jewish vibe, beautiful rooms, fabulous all-inclusive facilities, and gourmet meals. What a business opportunity two hours from an enormous, affluent Jewish population!

Maybe some credit for this should go to the fledgling, up-and-coming, and very promising new Borscht Belt Museum, gaining strength and influence in its incubator in Ellenville, New York. I hope that it will inspire more than memorabilia, but a full, or even partial, return to the glory that was. Would it not be nice to be able to drive up express highways to your chosen location, in far less time than it was in the old glory days, which required dealing with hills and valleys in every village along the way, being challenged by enormous traffic jams and overheated cars?

I never really knew for sure what inspired my grandparents to become hoteliers. It was almost 100 years ago that Peshka and Yitzchak Bauman, Brooklyn-based immigrants from Augustow, Poland, bought a collection of three former farm houses on Fifth Avenue in Parksville. They knew nothing about running a resort hotel, but they were determined to learn.

My husband and I made the journey to their hometown in 2001. We were compelled to learn how my grandparents were motivated and confident enough to take such significant financial risks in order to become successful Americans. Augustow was where their lives began. Quite possibly that charming resort town influenced their decision to become hoteliers. It is a beautiful tourist destination with a lovely canal. We speculated that perhaps growing up in a village of many guest houses and visitors made the two of them feel at home in Parksville, another town with its own appealing visitor spots and guest facilities, including a stunning waterfall and a meandering brook, all surrounded by mature foliage and wonderful fresh, cool air.

Their ambition provided the fuel for their purchase of the small hotel. The only thing they lacked to consummate the transaction was a payment of $5,000, an enormous sum that, remarkably, they were able to borrow and pay back in a short time. They particularly wanted their investment to yield a dentist, their son Charlie, who ultimately successfully graduated from the NYU College of Dentistry, an expensive education that they were already able to afford. Peshka peddled his dental services in the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant where they lived, telling her friends and neighbors that her son was a doctor but they didn’t need to be sick to schedule an appointment with him.

Through the next generation the hotel survived as the eponymous Bauman House, with its professional sign hung with pride, first as a typical small boarding house, featuring only a handball court, which was actually the side of the building housing the casino upstairs. The casino’s ground level served as a barn, with rented cows, providing Peshka with the cream for her baking, milk, and butter. The upstairs level was for the nightly entertainment, usually dancing to an amateur band. There was no swimming pool and certainly nothing resembling ensuite bathrooms. There was, however, Peshka’s remarkable cooking, including homemade breads and cakes, and a long list of other delicacies, all outstanding and in unlimited quantities. Low prices and that delicious kosher dining insured a clientele more concerned with their meals than swimming. Business boomed!

My two uncles and Mom were part of the staff. Uncle Dave drove the family Chalmers Touring Car, in which he picked up guests at the train station, a quick quarter-mile away. The dearth of guests with their own private family cars made chauffeur service mandatory. Charlie, the soon-to-be dentist, was a waiter in the dining room. Mom was an all-around assistant-cum-chambermaid. Pop was the fix-it guy, and Peshka was the tactful manager par excellence. Guests had not only to be fed. They also had to be nurtured with diplomacy.

Mom always said that the hotel killed her mother, who died at 62, wheelchair-bound. The next generation, Mom and her two brothers became innkeepers of a different sort. They converted the Bauman House to a kuch alein, a step toward its eventual slow decline.

Things have come full circle now. Some are dreaming of seeing an attempt to remember, reincarnate, reinvigorate, restore, and even reinvent what was. Maybe we Jews have, at last, realized that international travel is exciting but regional travel is more easily attainable by the masses and can complement world journeys. Sometimes I think that my husband, that former waiter, and I have been to all the faraway places with strange sounding names that we want to visit, and, aside from Israel, which is a different category entirely, would find it incredibly nice and restorative to spend a few days in the Catskills, a short ride from our New Jersey home.

If they build it, we will come!

And so will you!

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of eight. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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