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August 05, 2008

Tania Grossinger's Wild Catskills Girlhood

If you've ever considered the movie "Dirty Dancing" more a lifestyle template than a movie, then read Tania Grossinger's book Growing Up at Grossinger's for an inside look at the fabled resort -- from the inside. Just reissued after first appearing in 1975, the book combines family and social history, well-polished celebrity sightings and lots of adolescent angst, with a couple of Patrick Swayze types around to keep the narration sweating and the poodle skirts bouncing.

The book provides an especially frank view of the social pressures on young Jews of the 1940s and 1950s. Today's lingering years (or decades) of being single didn't fit the norms then. Grossinger, who actually lived with her mother at the resort, zeroes in on the brute facts of life as existed from a very young age. Writing about "summer seasonal" families that spent weeks on end at the resort, with the fathers schlepping down to Manhattan for the work weeks, she observes

They (the mothers) sent their children to the Day Camp (which is how I met most of them) and on Saturday evenings many would dress their little girls as miniatures of themselves -- bouffant hairdos, spike-heeled shoes, a rhinestone or two, and if the daughter was 11 or 12, perhaps a mink "stolette" (a tinier version of their own full-length model). I remember the first time I overheard a mother asking her 12-year old if she had a date that night. When told no, she chided her unaggressive child and told her in no uncertain terms: "Why do you think I brought you here? it's never too early in life to meet the right kind of people. They boys you are playing with may very well grow up to be doctors and lawyers someday."

Tania worked at the resort in various roles starting when she was 14. Her first job descended to the level of Stephen King-like horror. I lack the stomach to set up the full context, but the passage includes the nightmarish quote, "Don't be afraid to put some on my tushy."

Grossinger headed for Brandeis for college, where she rubbed elbows with Abraham Maslow and other luminaries. Her hierarchy of values led her to journalism and public relations, and the world is a better place for that. The hotel closed in 1986, but this website stands as a picture-packed memorial to it. The condition of the place in "before and after" pictures up to 2006 is horrifying, like photos from abandoned Chernobyl. But the before pictures show it during the glorious era Grossinger writes about.

For a fun beach spin with plenty of name-dropping and gobs of mother-daughter conflict, Tania Grossinger delivers the goods. Care for another helping?

Van | 08/05/08 at 07:10 PM | Categories: Doing Jewish

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