Summer Haven

This volume provides for the first time a collection of writing that investigates the stories and struggles of survivors in the context of the Jewish resort culture of the Catskills, through new and existing works of fiction and memoir by writers who spent their youths there. It explores how vacationers, resort owners, and workers dealt with a horrific contradiction--the pleasure of their summer haven against the mass extermination of Jews throughout Europe. It also examines the character of Holocaust survivors in the Catskills: in what ways did they people find connection, resolution to conflict, and avenues to come together despite the experiences that set them apart? The book will be useful to those studying Jewish, American, or New York history, the Holocaust and Catskills legacy, United States immigration, American literature, and American culture. The focus on themes of nostalgia, humor, loss, and sexuality will draw general readers as well.

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).