Sequel novel "This Never Should Have Happened" is now live!
Growing up backstage at a Catskills resort in the Borscht Belt's heyday. Memoir and vignettes by Bart A. Charlow.
For a few golden decades, the Catskills were America's ultimate summer playground: nearly 2,000 hotels, bungalow colonies and rooming houses, a million visitors a summer, and entertainers who got their start on those stages. Bart A. Charlow was a "hotel brat" who grew up behind the curtain. These two books preserve the humor, folklore and heart of a world that will never be replicated.
Step inside the golden age of the 20th-century resort era through the eyes of a boy raised in his family's hotel. You may have glimpsed this world in Dirty Dancing and Mrs. Maisel. This is the view from the kitchen, the dining room and the back stairs.
Best for: Catskills alumni, their children and grandchildren, and anyone curious about Jewish resort culture and American hospitality history.
The zany stories that didn't fit in the memoir: kitchen crises, quirky guests, dining-room antics and the tall tales of several "mountain rats." Short enough to read a few at a time, and a must for anyone who left their heart in the mountains, or wishes they had.
Best for: readers who like humor and folklore in small doses, and a good gift for anyone who summered in the Catskills.
The "Borscht Belt" was a playful name stuck to the Jewish resort scene in the New York Catskill Mountains. Almost 2,000 hotels, bungalows and rooming houses held over 50,000 rooms in a triangle roughly bordered by Monticello, Liberty and Ellenville and their surroundings - the largest concentration of resort accommodations in the world during the heyday of the 1950s and '60s. One million people from the Greater New York area visited every summer for a season that stretched from Memorial Day through Labor Day, with a brief 10 days in the Fall for the Jewish High Holidays. Some resorts were year round with massive recreational facilities of all kinds. Almost 200 famous entertainers, athletes, and politicians played there, many getting their start in those hotels. The scene was depicted in Dirty Dancing and Mrs. Maisel. This Never Should Have Happened (and That Catskill Summer more-so) take place in the Catskills.
Cheap jet travel, the Civil Rights Act opening accommodations everywhere to everyone, and the exorbitant overhead of full-time entertainment and American Plan meals (3-4/day!) ended the attraction and financial viability of those resorts by the 1970s. Most of them burned down or fell down after bankruptcy. A few hotels and bungalow colonies were bought up and are now operated by Jewish religious groups, but they are not operated as shown in the movies anymore. Villa Roma, an originally Italian resort, still does operate as a hotel and bungalow establishment in the old Borscht Belt model, but it is not Jewish. It serves as an inspiration for a hotel in my novels. You can read the details in my memoir A Catskill Carnival.
Long before the movie Dirty Dancing, the Borscht Belt resorts were famous as a place to find a date and possibly a mate. It was a hotbed of hot beds, and by the mid-1960s the sexual revolution was in full flower, changing the rules and roles of the mating game. Dirty Dancing is fiction, as much Hollywood of Bollywood as truth. In fact, though it depicts that '60s era in the hotels, it was actually filmed in the South, after the death of the Borscht Belt. My books are set in that same place in that same era, only they are much truer to the life in our "Love by the week and the weekend" culture. And all but two of the places depicted really exist.
What exactly is a “memoir” and what qualifies someone to write one?
People often confuse memoir with academic history; it’s not! Nor is it quite an autobiography, though many memoirs are autobiographical.
So what is it?
Think of it as a snapshot of something significant in the life of the writer, or something historically interesting that the writer experienced personally. It’s non-fiction, though it may read with some of the drama, tension and description of the best of fiction.
A memoir is “true”, but not necessarily precisely accurate factually. Now I’m probably really confusing you.
History portrays accurate facts – or at least as they are known and agreed to broadly. On this date that person did something, and there’s general consensus that it happened that way.
Memoir, by contrast, starts with the word “me”.
It’s the truth from an individual’s standpoint, how they experienced something, though it may not be 100% factually accurate, and others may have experienced it quite differently. It’s their truth, not everyone’s, and that’s what makes it interesting.
History is generally dry. A memoir cannot ever afford to be.
When I wrote my memoir, A Catskill Carnival, the subtitle told it all: “My Borscht Belt Live Lived, Lost and Loved”. My truth from the viewpoint of a 3rd generation hotelperson, a “hotel brat” growing up in the middle of all that tumult, and how I came to view it differently at various ages.
How I viewed that world is different from the guests, the paid staff, and even my family members, not to mention the other hotel brats with their own fiefdoms and stories.
But it is my truth, and I wrote it to be as engaging and entertaining as I would have told you over a drink on a long evening.
Most accounts of or tributes to the Borscht Belt glorify the entertainment, and indeed that was a very big part of its richness. But it was far from all of what drew millions to the Catskill hotels and bungalows. There was an entire culture, a seminal period of Jewish-American history that still influences much of resort style and American culture today.
All that is true and I do give credit to it in my talks about the era. But my books are written to show the inside stories, the heartache, the headaches and the head scratching characters that made it so vibrant at the level that real people knew – not just the rich or famous.
So when you reach for my books, you will find that “me” in the memoirs, but if you were there, you’re likely to find a bit of yourself as well.
Happy reading!
