2 comments about Borscht Belt Bungalows.

1. Springtime in Brooklyn, circa 1966, was punctuated by the gruff call of Ruby The Knish Man (a minor celebrity in Brooklyn and in this book), who sold legendary hot potato knishes smothered in kosher salt from a pushcart which would magically appear anywhere you were in Brooklyn or in "the country," that area of the Catskill Mountains of lower upstate New York usually referred to as the Borscht Belt and characterized by bungalow colonies.
   
   Bungalow colonies have been slighted in the histories. Large resorts, such as Grossinger's, are extensively documented, and the careers of Borscht Belt comedians and other stage performers, are the stories of rising stars. But most of New York City's Jewish population (and the Borscht Belt was almost exclusively Jewish) could not afford an entire summer away at a large resort; they chose rather, to rent bungalows. A bungalow can be charitably described as a summerhouse, and less charitably described as a shack. Which it was depended largely on the bungalow colony where you rented.
   
   Irwin Richman, whose family owned a bungalow colony in Woodbourne, New York, has written an exhaustive, chatty history of the bungalow colony business, which had its beginnings in the Ninteen-teens, but really only came into its own with the general prosperity of the 1950s. For the next twenty years, the annual migration of Jews from the Five Boroughs to the relatively rustic towns of Ulster and Sullivan Counties topped one million per summer.
   
   Bungalow colonies were resorts of last resort. Mothers and children typically stayed away from home all summer long, with fathers coming up on weekends and during vacation weeks.
   
   Entertainment was scarce and primitive: A man with a movie projector, several cans of films, and a portable screen would set up weekly in the "casino," a large, rambling building sometimes containing a few chairs, a pinball machine, ping pong tables, and bingo paraphernalia. Card games were ubiquitous. Occasionally, a singer or comedian either from the large resorts, or not talented enough for the large resorts, would perform. There was always a pool, not always in the best of shape. TV reception was poor and snowy, since the mountains and distance interfered with the broadcast signals from New York.
   
   Mothers cleaned and cooked and played mah-jongg, and were single parents five days a week. The outside world seemed far away. Cars (usually only one per family in those days) stayed behind in the city with fathers so they could go to work. Food shopping was a family outing left for weekends. So many bungalow colonies had just one pay telephone for all the residents. Jars of change were helpful, but calls, both outgoing and incoming, were rare (and announced over the colony's PA: "Mrs. Minde, you have a call from your sister!"). In the bungalows, where one bedroom was often shared by parents and children and where walls were paper thin, privacy was more a matter of mutual disregard than self-containment. A bungalow colony was also a mosquito's idea of a luncheonette.
   
   Yet, so many of us (including me) who spent summers there remember bungalow colonies fondly. They were countrified, particularly in comparison with our neighborhoods at home. Parents seemed more relaxed and tolerant in the clearer, cleaner air of the mountains. Kids roamed freely and safely, having spectacular adventures in the woods, catching butterflies and frogs and salamanders and fireflies in jars, picking blueberries, and running from snakes as fast as possible. Trees. There were trees. And lots of grass. Barbecues were a common form of meal preparation. Mornings in the mountains were often chilly, and I can remember my father lighting the stove in the predawn half-darkness to heat our little house, the sweet smell of the propane still a comforting memory. Stars seemed to jump out of the sky at night. Ice cream was particularly cold in the country, glass soda bottles needed an opener in those days, baseball games were best experienced on the radio, you made new friends in minutes, and it was a time that had come and gone before we even knew that what we were seeing was vanishing before our very eyes.
   
   As Richman points out, bungalow colonies still remain, now primarily the preserve of Orthodox Jews who maintain traditional forms of behavior. It seems proper that they still sustain a bungalow colony culture, after so many of us have moved away from it.
   
   Bungalow colonies ended for us much as Brooklyn ended for us, when we city dwellers moved to Long Island. In the green spaces of the suburbs, the need to get away was less pressing, and bungalow colonies suffered from suburbanization since so much of what motivated bungalow colony life was that need. In the light of suburbia, bungalow colonies took on a ratty, disreputable air in memory, and those summers were rarely recalled with much affection, particularly by women, who cooked, cleaned and kept house, it all being very much like being at home. As travel costs dropped and the world shrank, a winter trip to the Bahamas became less expensive and far more appealing than a summer in a bungalow, just as a trip to Las Vegas trumped a trip to the Tamarack Lodge.
   
   Today, with cable and satellite TV, cell phones, iPhones, computers, fax machines, and X-boxes, the relative remoteness of bungalow colonies, one hundred miles from home, seems unbelievable, but, as Irwin Richman tells us, it was a simpler, gentler, and more stable world. Passing Yankee Stadium on Memorial Day. Passing Yankee Stadium on Labor Day. Birds and bugs. Milk "from Dellwood with love." Flypaper. Blow-up liferings in the shape of seamonsters for swimming, and still more change for the phone. Splintery Adirondack chairs. And Daddy, driving up in the '60 Chevy convertible in the middle of the night because I had a 104-degree fever. He made it from Brooklyn to Monticello, a two hour drive, in 45 minutes.
   
   Some things you never forget. Thanks Dad.



2. Mr. Richman tells a story that only he could tell.His humorous, nostalgic account of the Catskill's golden era and its decline is one worth reading.

3 comments about The Soup Has Many Eyes: From Shtetl to Chicago--A Memoir of One Family's Journey Through History.

1. The story of a family, a heritage, my heritage, I was unable to put this book down once I opened it. She writes so well, she is so fluid and masterful with her words, the story had to be told. It is simply the story of how a family got here, and yet it speaks volumes about a time which is little known and hardly written about.

   I loved this book. I reccomend buying it. If you are a history professor use it as your text book. If you would be truly multi-cultural then learn this story.

   May it bring as much joy to you as it did to me.




2. The story of a family, a heritage, my heritage, I was unable to put this book down once I opened it. She writes so well, she is so fluid and masterful with her words, the story had to be told. It is simply the story of how a family got here, and yet it speaks volumes about a time which is little known and hardly written about.

   I loved this book. I reccomend buying it. If you are a history professor use it as your text book. If you would be truly multi-cultural then learn this story.

   May it bring as much joy to you as it did to me.




3. This exquisite little book, The Soup Has Many Eyes, is a hybrid of history, mystery, proverb, and poetry. Most of all, it is a mother's memoir to her two sons, Josh and Jonny, as they embark upon their own journey in life - a journey that is both connected and disconnected with its heritage.

   Perhaps a little too disconnected, or so the author, Joann Leonard, believes. In her narrative, Leonard attempts to fill in the spaces for her sons, to connect them to their past so that their present will have context. While much of the book narrates her family's struggles as they leave Russia amid the pogroms of the early 20th century to come to America, the "history" of the book serves as a backdrop for Leonard's musings about life and legacy. What do traditions mean? What do their voices say today? Can they serve her sons too, the children of a Jewish mother and a father who is the son of a Lutheran pastor? Leonard wonders (or laments?), "Did I tell them, did I tell them? Little things, forgotten. Big things, omitted. Things that, because I didn't know how to tell you, my hands and eyes tried to word." In The Soup Has Many Eyes, Leonard tells them.

   And so much she tells them. Across time, Leonard spirits Gramma Chana back for an archetypical dialogue on her maternal doubts.

   "`Gramma Chana, tell me,' I ask, `how do you know?'

   `Know what, child?'

   `What mothers are supposed to know?'

   `Know? Achhh! What is there to know? You hoe your gratchkeh, the bread you knead until it feels just so, when comes the baby, you push. For this you need to know? Your heart, do you tell it to beat? Your breath, do you say "now in, now out"? So what's all this "know"?' . . . `Look at the men with their watery eyes, Joann. They squint at their books for so many years, they squint out all the color from their eyes. They clutch their foreheads with their hands ready to snatch the live thing inside that gnaws to get out. But always, there are more questions.'

   `So what am I supposed to do, Gramma?'

   `Do? Make the soup. That's what you do.'"

   Ultimately, Joann's "answer" is that turgid alchemy of past and present that connects all the hope and fears of all generations going back to Eve.

   "Josh and Jonny, do you ever remember us hugging you so hard and so long that you felt as if you couldn't breathe, as if it would never end? That's the hug of parents holding their child for all the parents in the world whose arms go empty. Parents whose children have been stolen from them by war, starvation, hatred, drugs, disease, despair. It is an embrace born out of guilt and gratitude that our child is here, though we are no more deserving. It is a fierce attempt to ring you with talisman and benediction."

   Leonard's letter to her children is timeless because its taproot reaches down into the mystery of our dreams and memories. We live, love, work, and die to pass down our wisdom to our progeny. And why? Who can know? But The Soup Has Many Eyes describes the what and how if not the why and why not, and in Leonard's vivid images of her own history our collective consciousnesses meet.

5 comments about Ben Israel: Odyssey of a Modern Jew.

1. In an untouched, diary format, Katz describes his mindset and world view as it slowly develops over time revealing every embarassing shortcoming as he desribes his journey from an aetheistic, anti-Christian, Jew to the born-again Christian that he is today. One is struck by how selfish and self-absorbed he was until he received the promptings which led him to a greater understanding of himself and ultimately about the nature of a loving God.
   
   This is a great source of encouragement not only for Jews who have converted or who are contemplating doing so but also for anyone who has fallen on hard times self-inflicted or otherwise. This man's testimony shows that there is always hope and that no one is a "lost cause". All you need is faith in yourself and in God.
   
   One of the better autobiographies I've read in a while.



2. 
   Is there such as a Jewish Christian? Yes, indeed. And this also I wondered, before reading Arthur Katz's testimonial book. It doesn't really matter so much that he be a Jew, although only from a cultural perspective, but that he represents the true seeker.
   
   The genuine evolution in the author's narrative tone through the book, his psychological portrait, his humanity, his inner live, are presented to us in the way of short daily annotations.
   
   This is not fiction, it is real. And we are given a wonderful window into the heart and soul of a man. But, of course, in the end it all comes up to you, the reader, to decide how to take his story.
   If you are another seeker, an honest one -regardless of your cultural background-, I strongly recommend this book. If you are already a sincere Christian, this will surely identify with your own search, sometime along the path of your live. As it did to me.
   And for the curious, those who lead complacent, sedative or self-deluding lives, it is also a great read, a travel book where you are sure to find some character that you may have found along the way in your own trips in Europe or Israel.
   
   Enjoy it whoever you are.



3. This book is written by a very self-absorbed man with an extremely protracted adolescence. He wanders the earth backpacking a la 70's style looking for himelf and the answers of the world on this jouney. He has many affairs on the way, impregnates a woman, while a wife is left back at home in a mental institution all during the jouney.

   Apparently he proposes that he found all the answers he seeked at the end of the book---he converts from Judaism to Christianity. Although he didn't seem to really have much understanding about Judaism at the start. I don't get how he arrives at this conversion, he waxes on so poetically, as the beatnick poet he imagines his life to be. And I am convinced he's just as messed up at the end of the book(where he claims he's found Jesus and the answers to his great quest) as he was in the beginning. Or more so.

   It disgusted me as a Jew that some guy---a selfish loser--- treats it all so poorly. And takes himself this seriously.




4. I highly recommend the reading of this book for both religious and non-religious people alike. It is thought provoking, entertaining, and probably for some, life changing. It honestly is one of those books that years from now, when you are sitting around with your friends talking about memorable books and movies, you will think of with great fondness.



5. I have given away more copies of this book than any other. It is an engrossing first-person account of one man's struggle and journey to faith. Art hides no thoughts and hides no flaws - he explores and exposes his sins and failings as he gropes through the meaninglessness of the relativistic and atheistic modern world he once revelled in and helped promote to the culmination of his search in an encounter with the Living God of Israel - in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether you are a Jew or a Gentile, a believer or a non-believer, you will be challenged and stirred by this book. It is to be republished soon, possibly under the name APPREHENDED BY GOD.

1 comments about The Persistence of Hope: A True Story.

1. This is a book I couldn't put down. Its a first person narrative of a young Jewish artist and his parents running from Belgrade to Southern Italy. They were first living in refuge camps, and finally hiding in the mountains in Northern Italy running from the Nazis.
   
   I wanted to know how they survived in the camps and who allowed them to leave and who hid them once they out in the Italian hill towns. The Italian people who hid them were amazing. Its a story of the human spirit. A man who saved his parents and brought them to America.

1 comments about The Body of Brooklyn (Sightline Books).

1. This is a truly wonderful and unique book. Lazar's voice--conversational but concentrated, self-aware but entirely un-coy, and often just plain out funny-is unlike the voice of any other nonfiction writer I know, and his approach to his subjects is never hackneyed. He can write about such familiar topics as family, sexuality, culture and how they inform his sense of his own identity and identity in general and line by line, paragraph by paragraph, you never get that sense of "oh, he's taking X familiar line" that almost every writer gives. That's what I think the one of the blurbs means by describing Lazar as a writer's writer's writer: people who have read deeply and widely will perhaps appreciate this collection most, since they are most likely to understand the subtle brilliance that illuminates every page.

No comments about Jewish Fathers: A Legacy of Love.

No comments about American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture and Life & Brandeis Series on Jewish Women).

2 comments about Grandma Esther Remembers.

1. children would be thrilled by this book, i found it exhilerating. the girls are particularly beautiful, and the way they interct with their grandmother is completely amazing. my children learned alot about jewish culture and tradition from this book.



2. i am really amazed with this book
   my children really were amazed with this
   i really thing that you should give this book a try and check it yout

5 comments about From Central Park to Sinai: How I Found My Jewish Soul.

1. To say that Roy Neuberger's book entitled "From Central Park to Sinai" was a real page turner, is a definite understatement. This most engrossing and captivating book details the story of a personal transformation of a man searching for spiritual meaning and purpose in his life. The grandson of a great rabbi and founder of the "Mussar" movement in Judaism, Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, Roy Neuberger's life couldn't be further apart from that of his grandfather. Educated in the traditions of ethical culturalism, Mr. Neuberger felt an ever present spiritual vacuum in his life and as such he embarked on a personal quest for truth, via the study of Catholicism, Protestantism and a whole host of other religions and value systems. He even wrote a book detailing why these other religions and their credos were superior to that of Judaism and why Judaism held no meaning.
   
   Accompanying Mr. Neuberger on his trajectory towards spiritual fulfillment was that of his beloved wife, Linda, also a student of ethical culturalism. The fear and uncertainty that plagued Mr. Neuberger throughout his life could be simply termed as a man living through a perpetual anxiety attack with no relief in sight.
   
   It would seem that G-d heard the inner cry and pain of Mr. Neuberger, and as destiny would have it, he was guided in the direction of Rebbetzen Esther Jungreis. That night in Neuburgh, NY changed the course of an entire generation of Neubergers. Mr. Neuberger was deeply impressed with Rebbetzen Jungreis' Torah message and he began to attend her classes on a weekly basis, despite the hardship of traveling such a long distance during a fuel crisis. Rebbetzen Jungreis served as a conduit to bring the message of G-d's love and compassion to a man who hungered and thirsted for spiritual guidance and meaning. In essence, Mr. Neuberger began to fall in love with G-d, embracing His Torah and commandments.
   
   Since that time, Mr. Neuberger and his wife have raised a beautiful family steeped in Torah values and has spread his joy and understanding of spiritual truth with hundreds of people who he has invited to his home to enjoy the uplifting experience of Shabbos.
   
   Mr. Neuberger's story will not only inspire, but will captivate the heart and soul of the reader. It is a must read for anyone searching for guidance and truth and even for those who are not searching for anything in particular. It is a welcome addition to any library and will remain within the recesses of the soul for posterity.



2. This was a heartfelt story of a mensch who was dissatisfied with the lack of spirituality in bland liberal universalist culture in which he was raised. Eventually, he found true joy in Jewish orthodoxy. However, if you're pondering deep metaphysical issues, you'll find assertions here, but not deep abstract notions of different "isms" and why they are true or not. I was also uncomfortable with the assertion that Jewish assimilation caused the Holocaust.



3. Roy Neuberger's journey to find himself is extremely inspiring. It goes to show you that a man can have all the money in the world,but without a some spiritual guidance, what is he really living for? In some ways his wealthy background was a great hinderance to him. His parents did not give Roy all the proper attention and guidance as the Ethical Cultural Schools merely confused his thinking.

   Finally after 31 years, a colleague woke him up to the fact that he is a Jew whether he realizes it or not. Mr. Neuberger finally realized that he was not giving his own heritage a chance. Finally he asked to visit a synagogue with a friend and it so happened the Rebbetzin Jungeris was speaking there that night. At that point a chain reaction fo events triggered in Mr. Neuberger's brain that this was answer he was looking for.

   The rest of the book consists of many powerful miracles based on prayer and faith in G_d. Although many of the stories are repeated from Esther Jungeris' The Committed Life, it is still a pleasure read about people turning their lives around by believing the Power of the Jewish Religion. Judaism encourages its followers to be strong and persist towards acheiving happiness and overcoming obstacles.

   This book will make you believe in miracles even if you are not Jewish. An inspiration to us all.




4. Mr. Neuberger is a very enthusiastic and sincere man of faith, and these qualities shine through in his book.

   This book has the power of spiritual elevation reinforced by a sense of personal discovery.

   I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in religion, who can appreciate religion as an experience where personal growth and community involvement are not contradictory; but, parallel and mutually reinforcing.




5. Roy Neuberger's personal story has a strong message even for non-Jews and for people who are not religious. His personal search for God is very moving and is written in a charming, conversational style. I was especially taken with his numerous stories about he and his wife, Leah, helping so many people from various walks of life. There are important messages in this book that will help all of us to live better and more enriching lives.

1 comments about Prison on Wheels: From Ravernsbruck to Burgau.

1. This book is so short, but very informative, beautifully written by a Christian survivor of the Holocaust and her experience of transport in a Nazi cattle car. This should be an award winning classic.