cover image Catskill Culture

Catskill Culture

Phil Brown. Temple University Press, $65.5 (298pp) ISBN 978-1-56639-642-4

The author, a professor of sociology at Brown University and co-founder of the Catskills Institute, this book is an examination of his childhood legacy. He grew up a ""mountain rat"" in the Catskills where his mother worked as a chef, his father in various resort occupations; Brown himself had numerous jobs. His visits as an adult to his old haunts reveal a changed emotional and social landscape. Most of the bungalow colonies and once-grand and second-rate hotels are vacant or burned down and the resorts still alive today are run by Orthodox Jews or have become New Age ashrams. A once vibrant culture, ""a major facet of the Jewish experience,"" has, says Brown, disappeared with the secularization of Jewish daily life and the growth of affordable airline travel. Lasting for a good part of the 20th century, the Catskills were a community that went beyond a simple vacation escape. Tourism grew with demands for better facilities and entertainment. There was a magic in mountain life for the workers and for the summer residents that became truly glitzy with the addition of big-name entertainers. In 1991, Brown first began to see his roots as ""grist for an ethnography"" and from that time on he read, compiled oral histories and, in 1995, organized the first annual ""History of the Catskills"" conference. It was, he said, a ""spiritual homecoming."" Because of his fond experience, Brown's ethnography is much warmer, more personal than most. It is a documentary of assimilation and of a return to one's roots. An appendix lists 926 hotels. 91 b&w photos. (Oct.) FYI: Temple also published Irwin Richman's Borscht Belt Bungalows: Memories of Catskill Summers (Forecasts, Nov. 17, 1997).