Ah, Catskills the area just north of New York City where hundreds of resorts were built around the lakes nestled between those mountains how I miss you. This was the ultimate escape for people trapped in airless city buildings before air conditioning or most other modern conveniences had been invented. Part relationship-building feeding ground, part entertainer creating incubator that paved the way for Las Vegas, this was for a while the place where shtick came to live; where stand-up or at least its sardonic uncle was born.
Lex Gillespie’s brisk, slight and delightful look at this era is like flipping through old photo albums with your grandparents. “The Catskills” doesn’t avoid noshing on nostalgia, and it’s unapologetically committed to celebrating a “golden age” of the region’s importance to generations of Jews.
It is indeed well-trod ground that he covers here, but Gillespie is successful in placing everything within specific contexts. For example: At the turn of the 20th century, Jews were systematically excluded from nearly all country clubs and other leisure resorts. Signs reading “gentiles only” were not uncommon sights outside such establishments, and just as with hospitals (and hotels) that refused Jewish patients admittance until Jewish doctors created their own institutions (or until Holocaust survivors changed their names), certain individuals saw an opportunity.
These small cabins on lakes began as nature escapes for tubercular city dwellers who couldn’t breathe thanks to poor air circulation and cramped living conditions. But they quickly grew into huge resorts with golf courses and swimming pools and entertainment rooms that could’ve hosted acts performing in Manhattan.
One thing Gillespie does get right is how many people made what amounted to a pilgrimage every summer when they migrated on masse up north from New York City: It was a lot. The schlep up north was a ritual for rich folks and working-class families; a modern exodus to a temporary promised land where the food flowed freely, the work was put aside, and your daughters would hopefully meet (and sleep with) a law or medical student.
This was a place where as the joke goes the food was terrible and the portions too small. But actually, it was an unusual opportunity for people who knew real deprivation to gorge themselves; be they individuals who had escaped from or survived through some of the pogroms that swept across Europe in the early 20th century or just folks whose relatives had managed to get out of Poland before everything went haywire.
Creating their own social bubbles within hundreds of resorts and bungalow communities over several states’ worth of distance, every summer Jews from all over the Northeast would converge on this area, mingle at various dances and other social activities. And somehow still manage to maintain enough of an “us against them” attitude that when those anti-Semitic bastards finally did come around looking for trouble (or trying to start another war), our side already had its act together.
The documentary mentions films like Dirty Dancing but really, it’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel that has lately made this era popular again among even goyim who can’t pronounce “goyishe.” Gillespie traces the area’s beginnings as a Jewish summer getaway and shows how these family-run places basically turned into institutions; many were even at the forefront not only of creating safe spaces for Semites but also for hardball players like Jackie Robinson (who would’ve been barred from resorts down south).
Through contemporary interviews and an extensive archive of vintage material, Gillespie creates a vivid portrait of the time. The film tells us what happened but it doesn’t let us know how people felt about what happened. Once this “Jewish invasion” took place in upstate New York, no one ever asked the locals what they thought about it or recorded their conflicts with the newcomers. If several of these spots have been taken over by Hasidic communities, even more closed and loath to integration than those among whom they spend their summers, why don’t we see any footage from that? And are they still mad at each other?
On one hand, the movie works as a nostalgia trip; on the other hand, it’s a lament for lost time. What’s left now (with footage from 12 years ago) is not only sad but ugly all those once-grand resorts turned grimly uninviting, like elegant embalmed mummies.
The movie understands exactly where things went wrong: It knows about southern Florida being basically year-round Catskills weather, and Las Vegas being founded by Bugsy Siegel (who borrowed heavily from upstate) and so on. But mostly it was air travel becoming affordable and Jews getting more money that killed Jewish geography’s viability.
But there isn’t a lot more to say about Catskills legacy beyond that; for close to three generations now everything that’s meant anything Jewish has been understood via stuff that happened while people were spending summers lakeside playing Simon Sez between bites of whitefish salad or herring in cream sauce. The meatballs and wet hot Indian summer camp experience is probably the most direct descendant (as movies like Meatballs Indian Summer and Wet Hot American Summer would commemorate), but you can just as easily see it today in the showrooms along the strip or even on those floating Vegas-Catskills things cruise industry keeps sending out where food is infinite, sun’s warm, and you have nothing better to do than work on your tan.
So almost everything that made the Catskills what they were is gone now, and even the Borscht Belt that called so loudly for generations has become merely a vague punchline. But it’s not dead yet every time somebody tells a joke at an open mic or we watch another Brooks movie or play, that place still gets haunted. When Jews Were Funny goes into some of this stuff in greater detail if anybody’s interested in digging further down those holes.
If I had to use just one word to describe Gillespie’s Catskills: “postcard.” It doesn’t apologize for anything why should it? The film isn’t shy about being happy or sad or scared either; it just wants us all to remember there was such a thing as joy once upon these times, and given how bad things look out there right now who are any of us really in any position whatsoever ever again not listen?
For More Movies Visit Putlocker.