It Happened in the Catskills

A collective memoir of the famed “Borscht Belt,” that fabled summer resort area “just ninety minutes from Broadway,” It Happened in the Catskills melds side-splitting humor and tender nostalgia into an evocative look at the Americanization of New York’s Eastern European Jewish population and the impact of Jewish culture on the larger American scene. More than a hundred Catskill veterans—from the famed entertainers who got their start in bungalow colonies and small hotels to the cooks, waiters, busboys, mamboniks, and boys in the band—reveal through their recollections an experience that now exists only in memory. Illlustrated throughout with period photographs.