Grine Felder
Back in 1959, when I was a unhappy 14 year old in the
Catskill Mountains with an unfashionable taste for poetry in a time of rampant
materialism and conformity, the school librarian Gussie Kasofsky took an
interest in me. Sensing that I needed reinforcement from the world of
literature, she fed me books that made me feel less alone, including James
Joyce's "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" and Colin Wilson's
"The Outsider".
I knew little about Gussie except that she ran a bungalow
colony called "Grine Felder" (Green Fields) that was named after a
Yiddish play popular in the 1920s. Last night I saw a wistful movie based on
the play on Channel 13, the public station in NYC. It tells the tale of a
Talmudic scholar from the city gets a job as a tutor with a rural peasant
family where he finds romance.
This morning I did a web search on "Grine Felder"
and made the most extraordinary discovery, something that ties together my own
political beliefs with early Yiddish theater and the political and culture
milieu of Sullivan County, where I grew up and home of the "Borscht
Belt." This resort area in the southern Catskill Mountains was not only a
hothouse for the development of major talents like Danny Kaye and Sid Caesar,
it also nourished left-wing culture at a time when Jews were an oppressed
people in the United States.
About 10 years ago Phil Brown, a professor at Brown
University and Sullivan County "landsman" began the first of a series
of summer conferences on the Catskills. They have included notable talks by
people such as Phil Foner, who directed a band with his other brothers when the
witch-hunt made it impossible for them to work at their regular jobs in the
trade unions and the universities.
One of the other talks was on Gussie Kasofsky's bungalow
resort given by Martin Boris, author of three novels, including "Woodridge
1946." Woodridge is my home town and I read this novel with keen interest
about 20 years ago. Boris is also an expert on the Yiddish theater and is
currently working on a biography of Maurice Schwartz, a major figure from that
bygone world.
Boris points out that the bungalow colony was a favorite of
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the great Yiddish novelist and short story writer.
Singer had been introduced to the resort by his friend Zygmunt Salkin, a
budding theater director. Salkin sought to involve Singer in a production at
the bungalow colony of I.L. Peretz's "At Night in the Old
Marketplace," a Yiddish theater classic. This was in the late 1930s, at a
time when Yiddish theater had gone into a steep decline.
In 1937, the great author-critic Alexander Mukdoiny wrote,
"The Yiddish Theatre is finished. It is no longer even bad theatre. It has
no actor, no repertoire, no directors and no designers. Professionalism, talent
and ambition are practically dead."
According to Boris:
"Zygmunt Salkin's attempt at a solution that summer of
1938 was to gather a group of stage-struck youngsters and present them with his
own English translation of the I.L. Peretz play, to be produced under Singer's
guidance. The practical part of his agenda was the free use by the troupe of a
gathering hall in the bungalow colony known as Grine Felder (Green Fields). But
this was no ordinary Catskill resort for the families of middle-class Jewish
shopkeepers and businessmen who would come for a respite from Manhattan's
swelter. When Salkin and Singer arrived, Grine Felder had been for two years
summer home to the most concentrated assemblage of Yiddishist elite anywhere on
Earth. While other groups-artists, leftists, Bohemians-organized their own
colonies, none equaled the caliber of talent at Grine Felder."
Boris characterizes the colony's origins as "almost
mythic". In the autumn of 1936, a delegation from the nearby Mirth
bungalow colony, a favorite of working class Communists from New York, had
approached Raphael Kasofsky and Meyer Arkin, owners of the popular Avon Lodge a
mile outside of Woodridge.
"Representing 32 families dissatisfied with their
present summer accommodations, the delegates asked the two owners to build them
a modern enclave of approximately 40 units on 35 acres of unused Avon Lodge
property. The group would then assume all aspects of managing the colony, from
maintaining the grounds to collecting the rents and paying the owners' fees.
"By the next spring, the spanking new colony was ready
for occupancy. Its name would be Grine Felder, after the enormously successful
play and movie by Perez Hirshbein, who was among the colony's founding fathers.
At the eleventh hour, however, Hirshbein decided to remain at Mirth, out of
loyalty to its owner."
What Boris does not mention is that Meyer Arkin was
sympathetic to the Communist Party. I took piano lessons from Henrietta Neukrug,
who was part of his "mizpuchah" (extended family). She was an
outspoken Communist who kept copies of Soviet magazines openly displayed in her
living room in the 1950s, which took a lot of guts. Arkin's Avon Lodge was
where Sid Caesar first performed in public. As a member of the hotel's kitchen
staff in the 1940s, Sid and others put on socially aware plays and skits in the
hotel theater, including works by Clifford Odets.
Among the regulars at Grine Felder were playwright David
Pinski and Mendl Elkin, one of the founders of the Bronx's Unzer Theatre, and
Nahum Stutchkoff, author and playwright, whose radio series Tzores bei Leiten
("Trouble Increases") ran for 20 years on WEVD in New York City,
"the station that speaks your language" and whose call letters
honored Eugene V. Debs.
Refreshments would be served after musical performances at
Grine Felder, and the conversation would turn to the fate of European Jewry;
and general issues facing the left such as the German-Soviet Pact of 1939,
which badly splintered the left. Some of the bungalow colony's guests were
undoubtedly Communists while others were social democrats, including Samuel
Charney, who wrote under the name "S. Niger". He was an editor,
journalist and historian, who founded the Zionist Socialist Party and was
president of the Shalom Aleichem Folk Institute, Charney was considered the
dean of Yiddish literary criticism.
Meanwhile, Isaac Bashevis Singer prevailed over all of the
proceedings. In his memoir "Lost in America," he recalls that each
bungalow was named for a Yiddish writer or Socialist leader: Peretz, Sholem
Aleichem, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman.
Grine Felder continued for almost 50 more years. In 1973 a
neighboring ski lodge bought the colony and ran it for five years; eventually
it fell into bankruptcy. Finally, the town of Fallsburg took the colony in lieu
of unpaid taxes.
Someday the complete story of the intersecting worlds of
Yiddish theater, Sullivan County resorts and leftwing politics will be told. It
will include the details of the life of Paul Muni, born Meshilem Meier
Weisenfreund, who performed in the Yiddish theater as Muni Weisenfreund before
moving out to Hollywood and becoming a major film star. Until McCarthyism
destroyed his career, Muni was one of the acting world's outstanding leftwing
voices.
It will show how Romanian Jewish performer Aaron Lebedeff's
stage antics influenced Danny Kaye, who got his start in the Catskill Mountains
resort hotels. In October 1947, when HUAC had called its first 'unfriendly'
witness, the communist screenwriter John Howard Lawson, and actors including
Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Danny Kaye, traveled to Washington to lobby
the committee.
John Rankin, a Mississippian member of the committee,
complained:
"They sent this petition to Congress and I want to read
you some of the names. One of the names is June Havoc. We found that her real
name is June Hovick. Another is Danny Kaye, and we found that his real name was
David Daniel Kominsky...There is one who calls himself Edward Robinson. His
real name is Emmanuel Goldenberg. There is another one here who calls himself
Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hasselberg. There are others too
numerous to mention. They are attacking the Committee for doing its duty to
protect this country and save the American people from the horrible fate the
Communists have meted out to the unfortunate Christian people of Europe."
In fact, many of these Jews were connected to the world of
the Yiddish theater, especially Edward G. Robinson who, like Paul Muni, was
often featured in gangster movies. Melvyn Douglas was married to Helen Gehegan
Douglas, who was red-baited by Richard Nixon in his first successful electoral
bid during the 1950s.
When this story is written, it will clearly benefit from the
research now archived at Phil Brown's Catskill Institute archives:
http://www.brown.edu/Research/Catskills_Institute/index.shtml
If nothing else, it will give you a handle on the cultural and political roots of your moderator!