Summer Haven

Holli Levitsky is the founder and Director of the Jewish Studies Program and Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Her research and scholarship focus on Holocaust representation and questions of (Jewish) identity, especially as it relates to exile and displacement. She is the co-editor of, The Literature of Exile and Displacement: American Identity in a Time of Crisis (2013), and Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, an edited collection of literature and scholarship with sociologist and Catskills expert Phil Brown (September 2014). In 2001-2002, Dr. Levitsky held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Literature in Poland. She has participated in symposia, conferences, and study trips to Germany and to Poland to advance German-Jewish and Polish-Jewish understanding. She regularly leads workshops for secondary and college teachers in California and in Warsaw on teaching the Holocaust. Phil Brown is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute. He is Founder and President of the Catskills Institute, which maintains the largest archive in the world of material relating to the Jewish experience in the Catskills. He is author of Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area (1998) and editor of In the Catskills: A Century Of The Jewish Experience In The Mountains (2002). His work in environmental health includes No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action (with Edwin Mikkelsen, 1990; revised edition 1997), Illness and the Environment: A Reader in Contested Medicine (with J. Stephen Kroll-Smith and Valerie Gunter, 200), Social Movements in Health (with Stephen Zavestoski 2005), Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement (2007), and Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science and Health Social Movements (with Rachel Morello-Frosch and Stephen Zavestoski, 2012).

Acknowledgments Sources and Permissions

Framing and History



Introduction

Phil Brown and Holli Levitsky



Reuben Wallenrod’s Dusk in the Catskills and its Central Role in Catskills Holocaust History

Holli Levitsky and Phil Brown



Memoirs and Conversations



A Memoir from Before My Birth

Phil Brown



The Holocaust, the Catskills, and the Creative Power of Loss

Holli Levitsky



Catskill Reflections: Testimonial, Literary, and Jewish Values in Singer’s Novel

Sandor Goodhart



Legacy

Michael Berenbaum



Imaginings and Re-imaginings



From Dusk in the Catskills

Reuben Wallenrod



Dusk in the Catskills: My Father, the Holocaust, Memories, and Reflections

Naima (Wallenrod) Prevots



From Enemies, A Love Story

Isaac Bashevis Singer



The Holocaust, Three Women, One Man, and a Rabbi: Posthumous Reading in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story

Sandor Goodhart



From Summer on a Mountain of Spices

Harvey Jacobs



Reflections on Summer on a Mountain of Spices

Harvey Jacobs



From Woodridge 1946

Martin Boris



“Not to Know the Past is to Diminish the Future”: Reflections on Woodridge 1946

Gloria Boris



From Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began

Art Spiegelman



What We Didn’t Know

Hilene Flanzbaum



From Paradise, New York

Eileen Pollack



Preserving the Catskills: An Exercise in Nostalgia, or Survival?

Eileen Pollack



Bingo by the Bungalow

Thane Rosenbaum



Renewal

Thane Rosenbaum



A Catskills Muse

Phil Brown



Reflections on “A Catskills Muse”

Phil Brown



From Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust

Joseph Berger



Resuming Life After the War: Survivors in the Catskills

Joseph Berger



The Catskills (or What Was, Was, and Is No More) from A Jew Grows in Brooklyn

Jake Ehrenreich



Reflections on A Jew Grows in Brooklyn

Jake Ehrenreich



From Dreaming in the Ninth

Ezra Cappell



Balm of Gilead: Haunted in the Catskills

Ezra Cappell



New Imaginings and Last Days

The Four Seasons Lodge: Survivors in the Bungalow Colony



Andrew Jacobs



Prize-Winning Essays: Fiction



Catskill Dreams and Pumpernickel

Bonnie Shusterman Eizikovitz



Your Dovid

Rita Calderon



Prize-Winning Essay: Non-Fiction

Forgiving God in the Catskills

Michael Kirschenbaum



Index