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.
