IN SHORT: NONFICTION; Days of Borscht and Herring

• Published in: The New York times book review 1991, p.36
• Main Author: Siegel, Roslyn
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Comedians; Dining rooms; Hotels & motels; Nonfiction; Soups; Sports
• ISSN: 0028-7806

The sparkling IT HAPPENED IN THE CATSKILLS: An Oral History in the Words of Busboys, Bellhops, Guests, Proprietors, Comedians, Agents, and Others Who Lived It (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $24.95), illustrated with evocative period photographs, captures the flavor of the Borscht Belt -- that 250-square-mile area of Yiddish culture and Yankee ambition north of New York City. Beginning in the 1920's, as many as 500 hotels and bungalow colonies catered to the "organized pursuit of pleasure" of thousands of vacationers. Ironically, write Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, while the avowed purpose of hotels like the Concord and Grossinger's was to give city people a chance to enjoy the fresh mountain air and the beautiful countryside, memories cling to the inside -- the dining room, the nightclub, the dance studio. (The comedian Mal Z. Lawrence quipped, "They have an outside here, too?") Entertainers such as Eddie Fisher, Tony Martin, Neil Sedaka, Jackie Mason and Sid Caesar faced the most critical audience they would ever meet; the Catskills resorts served as a springboard for the pursuit of the American dream. The area was also the true home of improvisation -- the architecture itself was a product of fantasy and necessity -- from the proprietors, who sometimes rented the same room twice, to the musicians who doubled as waiters and bellhops, to the entertainers who nightly played the same show at three hotels, to the medical and law students who earned tuition as busboys. Between the seven kinds of herring in the dining room and Simon Says at the pool, the Frommers, who write frequently on sports and on Jewish subjects, take the reader on a sunny cruise down memory lane.