So Goes Grossingers, the Nevele – So Goes America… A Brief Reflection.

My mother (then – Beatrice Magazine) at the Nevele in the Catskills. The photo date is July, 1938. She was all of 19 years old, her 20th birthday still five months later.

Growing up in NYC in the 1940s and 1950s – the place for my family which was “closest to heaven” was the resort area in the Catskill Mountains – a low mountain range, hardly meriting the term “mountains” 100 miles or so from “the city.” And of course, being New York City provintials, there was only one city in the entire world – it was a world – New York City.

My parents, aunt and uncles, whenever there was a sale and prices dipped, went there already in the 1930s and to be there at “Grossingers” or “The Nevele” was a sign, albeit a deceptive one, of upward mobility, that young workign class Jews, the children of immigrants whose parents could never afford it, had made it out of poverty, the ghetto – even if, like my parents, at that time, that they hadn’t.