The Saturday Morning Post (No. 147)

 

During the second season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the family packed up the car to spend a month in a holiday camp in the Catskills. This was a custom of New York Jewish families throughout the most of the first 80 years of 20th century. In those days Jews were often denied accommodations at many places, so they made their own places. 

I learned all this in my search for books set in a summer camp where whole families would spend a month or a summer living in bungalow camps, returning year after year. It just seemed such a wonderful idea; spending more than a week in the wood with people you knew, doing all sorts of activities. I felt that this would make for some entertaining stories, so I searched for them. And I didn't find many. The few I did find seemed to be either mysteries or only slightly related to setting I was looking for. I suppose I'd have to find autobiographies and such of people who grew up in this tradition to get a flavor of the time. I did, however, find one book that looked promising, and it was available from the library, so I placed a hold on it. How did it turn out?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

The Inn at Lake Devine  by Elinor Lipman   B

As it turned out, this book, too, did not have what I was hoping to find. I enjoyed it, read it in a day, as you can see from my grade, but except for a couple of chapters set in a hotel in the Catskill in the 1970's, it had nothing to do with the time and place I was hoping to find. 

It is, however, a story about anti-Semitism. The young narrator's mother had sent out letters looking for places to stay for a family vacation in Vermont, and received a letter from the owner of the story title's inn, implying that it was only open to gentiles. This upset the young narrator more than her parents. They took a cabin on that same lake for a couple of years after that, and one year, they adopt a different name to visit the Inn at Lake Devine to see if they could book a room, with no results. However our narrator, Natalie Marx had made a friend at a  girls' camp with people who actually stayed a week at this very inn every year, and a year later she is invited to stay with them at the inn. It turned out to be not a great week and the two girls don't keep up their relationship, having little in common, including religion.

The story then skips ahead to when she is 24 years old. She is studying to be a chef. More or less by chance Natalie hooks up with that old friend, who remembers her fondly, and invites her to her wedding. What follows is the main part of the story, involving Jewism, expectations, and the Inn at Lake Devine.

As I said, I enjoyed the story, though it was not what I was looking to read. While it explored serious topics, it did so grounded in everyday life. Family considerations - young people, gentile & Jew and family considerations - played a large role in the story and the lives of the characters And while I am not fond of contemporary novels, the '60 & 70's are remote enough to be almost historical, even if I lived through them. A nice story, I recommend it.