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For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences. Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water. The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation. In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish \"Borscht Belt\" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

This volume provides for the first time a collection of writing that investigates the stories and struggles of survivors in the context of the Jewish resort culture of the Catskills, through new and existing works of fiction and memoir by writers who spent their youths there. It explores how vacationers, resort owners, and workers dealt with a horrific contradiction—the pleasure of their summer haven against the mass extermination of Jews throughout Europe. It also examines the character of Holocaust survivors in the Catskills: in what ways did they people find connection, resolution to conflict, and avenues to come together despite the experiences that set them apart? The book will be useful to those studying Jewish, American, or New York history, the Holocaust and Catskills legacy, United States immigration, American literature, and American culture. The focus on themes of nostalgia, humor, loss, and sexuality will draw general readers as well.

The year is 1958. Philip, a twelve-year-old kid from the Bronx, is getting ready for his family's annual trip upstate, where he'll spend the summer in a bungalow colony in the tiny village of Loch Sheldrake, New York, a faraway fairyland of mountains, lakes, starry nights, and dewy mornings. With his colony friends, he'll explore the woods and fields, have an array of adventures, and even experience the special charm of a childhood summer romance. It was a time and place of wonderful memories wistfully looked back upon fifty years later, and lovingly recalled in Philip Ratzer's memoir. What young Philip didn't know was that there would never be another summer like this one. He was not alone. In the 1950s, about two thousand bungalow colonies dotted the countryside of Sullivan and Ulster counties, catering to an estimated one million people a year who spent all or part of their summer in \"The Mountains.\" Among them were countless kids like Philip, who today carry with them the fondest of memories and a nostalgic longing for a precious moment in time that can never be equaled. Today, they find themselves returning to the country, seeking out the places where they stayed so long ago, only to find that the world has changed a lot in fifty years, and time has a way of erasing all evidence of a world that used to be. Bungalow Kid vividly recreates what it was like to be a city kid in the Catskills in the 1950s, and reaches out to all those kids, now grown, who would very much like to go back.

Through fiction, memoir, music, photography, and art, In the Catskills highlights the Catskills experience over a century and assesses its continuing impact on American music, comedy, food, culture, and religion. It features selections from such fiction writers as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Herman Wouk, Allegra Goodman and Vivian Gornick; and original contributions from historians, sociologists, and scholars of American and Jewish culture that trace the history of the region, the rise of hotels and bungalow colonies, the wonderful flavors of food and entertainment, and distinctive forms of Jewish religion found in the Mountains. What was life--the work, the play, the food, the romance--like at Catskills Mountains resorts? These very personal recollections capture the special sense of community and real sense of freedom that developed. Far from the welter of the city, Jewish families learned to vacation and enjoy themselves, to savor the social mobility and cultural space the resorts afforded, and to nourish their culinary and comic traditions. From \"Bingo by the Bungalow\" by Thane Rosenbaum to \"Young Workers in the Hotels\" by Phil Brown to \"Shoot the Shtrudel to Me Yudel\" by Henry Foner, this charming anthology captures an era that has had enormous impact on the Jewish experience and American culture as a whole. \"Whenever I speak about the Catskills,\" observes editor Phil Brown, \"I am struck by the strength of people's desire to relive their experiences in the Mountains.\" If you've visited the Catskills yourself, or heard stories from your parents or grandparents, or are just interested in this extraordinary time and place, pack your bags and prepare to enjoy your stay In the Catskills.

From the celebrated early American author of \"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow\": The nineteenth-century classic work of fantasy about one man's twenty-year nap.   In the years before the American Revolutionary War, in a village at the foot of New York's Catskill Mountains, lives a kindhearted Dutchman named Rip Van Winkle. He's admired by all his fellow villagers except for his wife, who incessantly nags. One day, in order to avoid her, Rip heads off into the mountains. There he discovers a group of mysterious men wearing antiquated clothes and playing ninepins. Soon Rip falls asleep amongst these strangers—only to wake up twenty years later to a vastly changed world.   Originally published in 1819 in Washington Irving's book, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., \"Rip Van Winkle\" was one of the first works of American literature to be widely read abroad and helped shape American folklore. Nearly two hundred years later, the story endures, continuing to capture the imaginations of readers young and old.   This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Let's tour small-town Americana with our hosts Nick and Brian as they take you along for \"the ride\" as they get up close and personal with the awesome people and places that make this great nation rock - all while in their 1968 gold drop top Cadillac!

In this paper I situate Goodman's novel against the Jewish American literary tradition of the earlier part of this century in order to argue that Goodman uses the inheritances of that tradition to formulate a new post-assimilationist stance. Taking into account both the sacred traditions of Judaism and the secular influences through which American Jewry has, in large part, defined itself, I examine how the ideas of legacy, exchange, and return function in the text for both its secular and Orthodox Jewish characters. The paper is divided into three main sections: the first, \"Land,\" looks at how divisions between the sacred and the secular tend to be centered around anxious sites of real estate and development. The second, \"Space and place,\" reads the construction of interiority and exteriority in the text as a way to articulate the difficult process of retaining the spiritual and practical boundaries that have been inherited into the Jewish tradition, while at the same time understanding what it means to traverse those boundaries and enter into a more secular space where traditional legacy becomes exchangeable. The final section, \"Return,\" traces Goodman's ultimate renewal of Jewish American literature as she points her characters back towards religion, community, and/or family and figures their return as evidence of an inheritance that remembers and practices American freedom within the paradigm of Jewish orthodoxy.

\"Hiking through the woods and along mountains is a favorite pastime for many. On a nice sunny day, a myriad of people--experts and novices alike--head to New York's Adirondack and Catskill mountains for some exercise and adventure. Unfortunately, some hikers unknowingly embark on their excursions unprepared. They may lack sufficient supplies of food and water; or don't have appropriate clothing, footwear, or navigational equipment and lighting with backup batteries to power them; or perhaps fail to share their itineraries and expected departure and return times with friends or family.\" (New York State Conservationist) Read two stories of people who were unprepared for their hike in the mountains. Hiking safety tips are presented.