38 minute read
A Tale of Two Camps
(September 2020)
1. Camp Kinderland: The Hot “Red” Summers of My Youth
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Brooklyn in the summers during and immediately after World War II (1942–1946), as I remember them, was unmercifully hot. Was this the result of an early and as yet unrecognized phase of climate change? No, mostly it was due to global political, economic, and technological conditions that prevented air conditioning—which already had been invented93—from reaching the mass American home market. Prior to the war effort, which began around 1940 with FDR’s “lend-lease” program supporting Britain against Hitler, the Great Depression was still at its height, so production and consumption of consumer goods was low. During the war, which began on December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor bombing), few consumer hard
93. The first electrical air conditioning unit was built by American inventor Willis H. Carrier, and was installed in a Brooklyn printing plant in 1902.
goods (cars, radios, refrigerators, and air conditioners) were produced for the mass market. Instead, production was directed to the war effort—with guns, tanks, jeeps, planes, ships, and radios manufactured at an incredible pace in plants and dry docks that had been converted quietly to defense production.
I remember not being able to sleep in my family’s small, twobedroom apartment in July and August, when the temperatures reached the nineties. People would congregate on the Brooklyn stoops and streets late at night in hopes of the slightest breeze. The “street scenes” were straight out of Clifford Odets.
During the summer days, I “hung around” the neighborhood with my friends, went to the movies—as much for the air conditioning (which had been installed in most theaters) as for the entertainment— played punchball and stickball in the streets and schoolyards, and fled to the beaches at Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Rockaway, and Riis Park with family, friends, and neighbors. We traveled by streetcar, bus, and subway—but seldom by car (we had none).
I remember one summer staying a few days with my aunt Gertie and uncle Harry Denberg at a gated enclave near Coney Island known as Seagate. To get there we got off the BMT elevated line at Surf Avenue and took a trolley car that traveled for a few miles through the dilapidated backyards of Coney Island until we arrived at the “private” Seagate entrance. The streetcar was like the Toonerville Trolley in the comics. I recall Seagate being described in many of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s haunting novels and short stories concerning Jewish life in New York in the 1930s and ’40s.
Still, I couldn’t spend all of my time in the relative comfort of Seagate, which left my parents grappling with the problem of “Julie” hanging around the streets and schoolyards of East Flatbush and Brownsville each summer. The solution came like a bolt of lightning in 1947. My parents decided that the time had come for me to partake of that great Jewish American institution: summer camp.
Some years ago, the Jewish Museum in New York mounted an exhibit on the golden age of Jewish summer camps, covering the 1920s to the 1960s. In the Jewish community especially, these camps frequently took on a religious, cultural, or political character based upon the nature of the groups that sponsored them.
On the left, the Workmen’s Circle, or Arbeter Ring, now known as the Workers’ Circle, the great Jewish social democratic cultural and political center established in the late nineteenth century, had started a children’s camp in 1923 known as Kinderland. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Jewish socialists in the United States—like socialists worldwide—“split” over the so-called “Russian question.” Those on the relative right of the secular American Left stuck with the Socialist Party and its satellite organizations, and the left-wingers formed what ultimately became the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The Arbeter Ring fractured, too, and the left-wingers, who were pro-Soviet, formed the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO), which belonged to an umbrella communist front group known as the International Workers’ Order (IWO).
The JPFO contingent left the Arbeter Ring and in 1929 took control of the children’s camp and adult resort on one side of Sylvan Lake in Hopewell Junction, New York. (I recently saw the town described in print as “Hopeless Junkyard.”) The Arbeter Ring people started a similar camp on the other side of the lake, calling it Kinder Ring. The JPFO children’s camp remained Kinderland, and the adjacent adult resort was Lakeland. So like Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the communists and socialists stared at each other from opposite sides of Sylvan Lake. They kept their “social [and political] distance.”
When I arrived at Camp Kinderland in 1947, storm clouds were forming over American-Soviet relations. The spirit of cooperation that had formed in World War II—during which time American communists were ultrapatriotic (albeit out of their dedication to
defending the Soviet motherland)94—was fading. Churchill had delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Missouri at President Truman’s urging in 1946.95 And a new wave of anti-communism—similar to the “Red Scare,” which occurred after World War I—was sweeping the country, as exemplified by the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.).
My first initiation into camping, however, had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with child psychology. My lifelong friend Terry Shultz had gone to Camp Kinderland in 1946, and he told me about what a great time he’d had. Several members of his family, including two cousins who lived on our street, also attended the camp. Members of Terry’s family were connected to the JPFO, and indeed, Terry’s mother worked as a secretary at the camp’s Manhattan office on Union Square.
Somehow, my mother got the notion that the way to get her eleven-year-old son, who had never been away from her for a night, out of the hot city during the summer was to send him to Kinderland with Terry, who was scheduled to return there in 1947.
I do not know whether my parents had the slightest idea that their decision to send me to Kinderland would profoundly influence the rest of my life, nor what the outcome would have been if I had never made it to Hopewell Junction. But I do know that after four summers (1947–1950) at Kinderland, my life would never be the same. In fact, Camp Kinderland was sort of the political equivalent of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, where I left the real world and entered a summer universe of “red” political imagination and magic.
By the end of the summer of 1947, I had learned the Soviet version of “The Internationale” (“Arise, ye prisoners of starvation . . .”)
94. Any history of the American Communist Party, such as Theodore Draper’s or that by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, attests to its ultrapatriotism in World War II.
95. See David McCulloch’s biography, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
and the Chinese Communist anthem (“Arise, ye who refuse to be bond slaves, let’s stand up and fight for liberty and true fraternity”), had listened to Paul Robeson sing as well as a young Pete Seeger, and had shaken both their hands (Robeson’s was massive; to me it looked as if he could hide a football in one palm). Terry recently told me that I said I’d never wash my hand again.
So, on a Sunday in late June 1947, after my twelfth birthday, my mother got me to “the co-ops” (a cooperative apartment development in the Bronx inhabited substantially by Jewish progressives), from which the buses left for the drive up the Taconic Parkway to Kinderland. I have a few photos of me with a “crew cut,” about to board a bus with Terry and another friend.
I vividly remember witnessing a middle-aged woman who was in charge of the buses hurriedly explaining to a child that his counselor’s name was Karpatkin,96 not Kropotkin, and that Kropotkin had been a Russian prince and anarchist philosopher in the nineteenth century. This was news to me, but I had yet to realize that this was no ordinary summer camp I was about to attend.
Throughout the bus trip up the Hudson Valley, the many returning campers sang union, civil rights, and left-wing songs: “We’re gonna roll the union on. . . . No more auction block for me, no more, no more. . . . United Nations make a chain, every link is freedom’s name, keep your hands on the plow, hold on.” After two hours, we arrived at camp and were led to Bunk 12, where our trunks and duffel bags, which had been shipped ahead by Railway Express (long extinct97), were waiting for us to unpack. There were
96. This is the same Marvin Karpatkin who in camp was known as “Talky.” His widow is a lovely woman named Rhoda, who for many years was the executive director of Consumers Union. She retired some years ago. I bumped into her a year or two ago at a Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) reunion in New York, where we sang “The Internationale” together.
97. Later, at the Teamsters, I was to handle a series of jurisdictional battles over the employees of Railway Express with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC).
about fourteen boys in our bunk (Terry and I were together—we and our mothers had made certain of that). Our counselors were Gene and Red, both of whom were college students—one in Philadelphia and the other in New York City.
For the first few days, I suffered a severe case of homesickness and wrote my parents that they had sent me to a concentration camp. Neither my bunkmates nor I had as yet heard of the Gulag Archipelago, although it was undoubtedly in full operation at that time. But it was neither Stalinism nor “bureaucratic collectivism” that was at the heart of my complaints. They were just the normal reaction of a timid twelve-year-old boy who had never been away from home and the normal regimentation required to control a bunk full of mischievous preteens and a diet of unfamiliar fare. The homesickness soon faded in the face of the usual camp activities, such as softball and basketball.
Two things that distinguished the camp were its adherence to a left-wing version of Jewish cultural values (nonreligious Yiddishkeit) and to pro-Soviet ideology and politics. Once or twice a week, we attended shula, an extension of the JPFO’s shulas, or afternoon nonreligious Jewish cultural schools in New York City, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. The schools paralleled the Sholem Aleichem schools of the Workmen’s Circle. We studied Yiddish and read stories by such Yiddish masters as Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. It was this orientation to Yiddish that later attracted me to Irving Howe’s Yiddish literature course at Brandeis98 and to Yiddish literature and culture in general.
On Sunday nights we would go to the social hall near the lake and watch Soviet propaganda movies (from Artkino Studios), about heroic Russian boys and girls in the Young Pioneers, Charlie
98. See Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1954), and Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Open Road Integrated, 2017).
Chaplin silents, or such pro-Soviet Hollywood products as North Star, with Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter. And before lights out, our counselors would read to us from such books as Pages from a Worker’s Life by William Z. Foster, the head of the Communist Party USA. They also read to us from technical works designed to teach us the “facts of life.”
The counselors were a jovial and interesting bunch of mostly college students, but it was clear that their political orientation was Communist Party (in the vernacular, “CP”). Many were World War II veterans who were going to college on the G.I. Bill. They were always rattling off about political theory and carrying tomes around from International Publishers, the Soviet-subsidized publishing house, on subjects such as dialectical materialism, or “diamat.” There was a book kiosk adjacent to the dining hall, containing, among other works, volumes from the Little Lenin Library.
Three of the leaders of the counselor intelligentsia were the aforementioned Marvin “Talky” Karpatkin, who became a leading civil liberties lawyer in New York City; Herb Gutman, later a highly respected labor historian; and Eugene Goodheart, who recently retired from the Brandeis faculty in English literature and who published his autobiography in 2002, entitled Confessions of a Secular Jew.99
The Daily Worker was a camp staple from which the CP version of the news, including sports, was received. “Police Beat Strikers” was a frequent headline. On Sundays, salutes or “pageants” were routinely performed for visiting parents and siblings, in which some international communist theme was the centerpiece. The first “pageant” that I recall involved campers being split up as Americans and Russians, and on “Red Square” we reenacted in costume American
99. I spent an hour or so with Eugene in 2002 in his office at Brandeis, reminiscing about camp and telling him how much I had always admired him for his ability to address the entire camp, including visiting parents, in fluent Yiddish.
and Russian forces joyously meeting toward the end of World War II at the Elbe River.
When I first got to camp in 1947, each bunk would march to breakfast in military style, but at some point that year, our marching days were canceled. The postwar thaw had been declared, and peace had broken out. Instead, the campers were to come to the dining hall each morning in large groups with arms linked, singing rousing political songs. One I remember went something like this:
Everywhere the youth are singing freedom’s song, freedom’s song, freedom’s song, Just to prove to the world that we are strong, we are strong, we are strong. We are the youth and the world proclaims our song of truth. Everywhere the youth are singing freedom’s song.100
In fact, this was the theme of one or another of the Soviet World Festivals of Youth, conducted for many years every summer somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Another favorite was the song of the partisans of the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, which goes something like “Zog nit keinmol oz mir gayen dem leste veg,” which translates to “Never say that we’re walking the last road.” This is a deeply moving song, shared by all in remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19–May 16,1943.
Spanish Civil War songs were also high on the Kinderland “hit parade”:
Spanish heavens spread their brilliant starlight High above the trenches on the plain.
100. I have in my files a pamphlet containing all the Camp Kinderland songs. Its alums maintain an active website.
From the distance morning comes to greet us, Calling us to battle once again. Far off is our land, yet ready we stand. We’re fighting and winning for you. On to victory. Freiheit [freedom].
We also sang this in Yiddish:
Meer kamphen un zigen far zich. Als tzu victory. Freheit.
This was the theme song of the International Brigades, young left-wing sympathizers from the United States and elsewhere who went to Spain in 1936 to fight on the side of the Spanish loyalists. The Spanish Civil War had ended disastrously about ten years before I arrived at Camp Kinderland, and, indeed, friends of people at the camp had died in Spain for the cause of the Spanish Republic against the reactionary fascist forces of General Franco. Of course, I did not know then of the duplicitous role of the communists against their anarchist, socialist, and Trotskyist comrades in Spain.101 Many other songs of the Spanish Civil War were sung as well, in both English and Spanish.
In addition to the pro-Soviet line espoused at the camp, the Jewish communists advanced the values of fighting racism, supporting worker and union causes, advancing the interest of world peace and the United Nations, promoting racial and gender equality, and, finally, supporting Israeli independence, which Moscow then favored. Both Russia and the United States voted in favor of the establishment of the state of Israel at the United Nations in 1948. I sympathized with all of those causes and values, and I wholeheartedly joined in the celebration.
101. See George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938).
Nevertheless, I did not buy into the CP dogma lock, stock, and barrel, and there is no question that I never saw myself as being part of what they might have described as ayne fun unzera (one of us). I am sure that the people who were on the inside of the camp knew which of the kids had parents who were CP and fellow travelers and which were not. I cannot say there was an effort to recruit me or my family. I do recall meetings of a youth group called Jewish Young Fraternalists in a loft on Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which I would attend occasionally during the school year, though my main motivation was social rather than political—to meet girls. Also, during the winter there would be Camp Kinderland reunions in Manhattan, which I would routinely attend to see camp friends.102
But if there ever was any doubt, 1948 made crystal clear that I was not “one of us.” That year, the communists and their allies in this country nominated Henry Wallace, who had been Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president from 1941 to 1945 and previously his secretary of agriculture, as the presidential candidate of their front group, the Progressive Party. His running mate was a progressive former senator from Idaho named Glen Taylor, who played the banjo. So the camp song for the summer of 1948 was “We Want Wallace in the White House,” to the tune of the labor anthem “Solidarity Forever,” which itself is sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
As for me, my homegrown pro-FDR and pro-Truman American Labor Party103 bias prevailed. I recall campaigning at thirteen
102. A Kinderland reunion was scheduled for Memorial Day 2005 in Santa Barbara, CA. I did not attend.
103. The American Labor Party was founded in 1936 by labor leaders and liberals as a mechanism to get socialists in New York State to vote for the reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt without having to press the Democratic Party lever, which was anathema to many of them. In 1944, anti-communists, led by International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union President David Dubinsky, left and formed the Liberal Party. The American Labor Party ceased to exist in 1956.
for Truman and his running mate, Senator Alben Barkley (D-Ky.), against Tom Dewey, the former governor of New York State who was the Republican candidate, and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, who was the candidate of the segregationist Dixiecrats. Thurmond and his supporters had walked out of the Democratic Convention in 1948 over the enactment of a civil rights platform that had been pushed by a young Hubert Humphrey, who was then the mayor of Minneapolis. Norman Thomas, the perennial socialist candidate, was in the race as well. But I was busy handing out Truman leaflets, much to the dismay of my camp comrades, some of whom I saw at home. Though they may have been disappointed in my choice, I don’t remember anyone giving me a difficult time about it. Indeed, I don’t think we ever argued about politics at camp, partly because the party line was that there was nothing to argue about. Or perhaps I was just timid and decided not to make an issue over anything. My politics came from the deep-seated New Deal liberalism of my family, and obviously that was inconsistent with “We Want Wallace in the White House.” Camp Kinderland, for all the impact it had on me, would not change that.
The real world often intruded into camp life. I can recall when counselors went to a rally in Peekskill, New York, on August 27, 1949, for a Paul Robeson concert that had been opposed by some racist town residents. The counselors, beaten and bloodied, returned on buses. The American Legion and some racist and fascist elements had been waiting for them with clubs and baseball bats, and it was fortunate that none of them were killed.
The government of the United States struck its own blow in 1949, when it indicted eleven leading communists under the Smith Act for conspiring to overthrow the government. Some of my camp friends’ parents and relatives were among those indicted, and the news cast a pall upon Kinderland. The son and nephew of an official of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union who was indicted, were in my bunk. In later years, I learned that in 1940,
the Communist Party had supported the indictment under the Smith Act of Trotskyists (members of the Socialist Workers Party), including the Minneapolis Teamsters leaders Farrell Dobbs and the Dunne brothers, in which a similar conspiracy had been alleged. Being politically unprincipled was part of the standard operating procedure of the CPUSA.104
Another incident at camp that deserves mention is the polio epidemic of 1949, which afflicted more than forty-two thousand people in the United States, seven thousand of whom died. The outbreak hit New York City hardest, so when parents and siblings came to visit their kids at camp on weekends, the campers were cordoned off from their parents by a rope that separated them by at least fifteen or twenty feet, from which they had to shout to one another to be heard. Thanks to the vaccine invented by Jonas Salk, polio is unknown to Americans today (though it remains a scourge in the developing world). But it was a major threat at that time and, as is well known, in 1921 crippled FDR for life.
Amid these troubling developments came a reminder that one should never underestimate the power of teenage hormones to provide a compelling diversion. Kinderland was co-ed, and there was much fraternizing between the boy and girl campers as well as the counselors. The atmosphere might be described as radical bohemian. So the camp provided my first exposure to male-female relations. I remember one girlfriend who led me to a secluded woodland outpost at the camp’s highest point, appropriately called “heaven.”
Another new institution that I dealt with at Kinderland was the bunk casa. For us, the bunk casa was the depository for all of the cookies, candy, and other goodies that we received in the mail from our families or that they brought with them on visiting days. Each of us was required to turn over our goodies to our counselors, who
104. See Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History. Also, Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism.
would distribute them equitably among all of us. This was my first exposure to the Marxist principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Kinderland had only one sports rivalry—it was with Camp Wo-Chi-Ca. Though it sounds like a Native American name, WoChi-Ca was actually an acronym for “Workers’ Children’s Camp.”105 Apparently, those pro-Soviet types who were true internationalists and disdained any religious or ethnic identification, such as being Jewish or enjoying Yiddish culture, sent their kids to Wo-Chi-Ca. Kinderland and Wo-Chi-Ca occasionally did battle on the sports field. Wo-Chi-Ca’s location was many miles away.
I recall that in junior high school there was a libertine young woman in my class who, upon learning that I had been at Kinderland, told me in utter confidence that she had been a camper at Wo-Chi-Ca. She was an attractive strawberry blond with ringlets who smoked a corncob pipe and would always slap me on the back, accompanied by a big “Hi, comrade Julie!”
We had other outlets for athletic competition, notably, “color war.” Color war is still common in summer camps, including the ones that my children Beth, Mike, and Annie attended. The entire camp was divided between the Bluye (Blue) and Veisa (White) teams, representing the colors of the Israeli flag, which was known as the Jewish flag prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. For four or five days, we competed on the athletic fields, on the stage, in song, in “hootenannies” (radical songfests), in dance, and in other activities. Our team songs were sung in Yiddish, such as “Hecher, hecher, zing is fun decher, di bloye team iz di best in kemp, di andre team iz shoyn farshemt” or “Higher, higher, sing it from the rooftops, the blue team is the best in camp, the other team will soon be humiliated.”
105. See Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca: Blacks, Whites and Reds at Camp by June Levine and Gene Gordon.
While my Kinderland days occurred well before the rise of the feminist movement, one memento I cherish is a photo of our group’s softball team. It depicts about thirteen males and one female, whose name was Sandy. I recall that she played center field, swung a mighty bat, and had the respect of us all.
Not all was fun and games, though, as each summer at Kinderland we had a work project. One summer we built an amphitheater. Another year we constructed a basketball court. In a way, the camp was sort of an Israeli kibbutz, American radical Jewish style.
While the camp consisted almost exclusively of Jewish kids from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, on occasion a Black boy or girl whose family had been victimized in a racial incident in the South attended. Their stories were made known to all. Hearing their accounts, as well as other outrages, such as the Peekskill riots, as told to us by our Kinderland counselors, reminds me of the Sholem Aleichem story titled “Dreyfus in Kasrilevke,” in which the Jews in a small rural shtetl somewhere in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia receive a weekly newspaper describing the famous Dreyfus case being prosecuted in Paris against a French Jewish officer in 1894. The issues of the paper come in by mail, and the townspeople gather each week to listen to stories of persecution with utter disbelief.106 This was very much like us Kinderlanders from the Jewish ghettos of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston hearing stories from the South of horrible racial abuses. Could such things really be happening? What could we do to change things? Perhaps it was the beginning of a lifetime of social action in one form or another for me. Through Camp Kinderland, I was exposed to many adults and kids from backgrounds different from my own, but there were common views, community goals, and aspirations. That people had to live together as a community and that together they might effectuate positive change were important values and
106. See Howe and Greenberg, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories.
goals that have remained with me for life. This was also my feeling about the democratic socialist and labor movements as I became more involved with both. Regrettably, such values have not fared well in our country as we move further into the twenty-first century, in which individual rather than community values too often prevail.
My participation in these activities later led me to feel that I had been cheated by not being sent to Camp Kinder Ring across the lake, where I felt I really belonged, with the social democrats. (The two camps had no contact whatsoever.) Indeed, at Camp Kinderland, the huge toilet on the hill was referred to as the Forverts Building, a derisive reference to the Yiddish Jewish Daily Forward, a social democratic paper. (I now read its online version.)
In the end, I look back on my four summers at Kinderland with mixed feelings. This was my first experience away from home and being on my own, albeit with some adult supervision, and I had a wonderful time and surely grew in the process. But the fact that I was subjected to the influence of a Jewish brand of Stalinism has always left me feeling duped and ambivalent. I know that there is a Camp Kinderland website, where alumni participate in maintaining old friendships, but I fear that other than my neighborhood and lifetime friendship with Terry, I would not be comfortable within the Kinderland alumni association. I suspect some of them never quit believing in their hearts that the Soviet Union collapsed because of “capitalist encirclement” rather than the truth: that the USSR was a fundamentally corrupt, one-party, totalitarian, bureaucratic state that was unable to win the hearts and minds of its people.
As for the camp, it was unfairly persecuted by the New York attorney general and in the end was closed down in 1971. I do not believe that the property has ever been rehabilitated, and I have been tempted to drive up the Taconic Parkway from time to time to take a look, as well as to visit Camp Kinder Ring across Sylvan Lake, which still functions. As yet, I have not done so.
I should also mention that there is a new Camp Kinderland somewhere in New England, and I am sure that it is frequented by children and grandchildren of the Kinderlanders of my day.
In retrospect, I have few regrets about my early exposure to the “Young Pioneers” of Kinderland. Indeed, with my having had the experience there, it was not difficult for me to make the transition to the democratic socialist Left in later years, in the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), as well as the revival of democratic socialism nationally through the efforts of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others.
2. Camp Onibar: From Communism to Capitalism
When I was about to turn sixteen, it was decided that it was time for me to part company with Camp Kinderland and get a paying summer job. I do not remember whether my parents or I came up with the idea, nor do I recall the reasons behind it. Either way, the time had come, so that summer I began my six-summer stint as a waiter at Camp Onibar.
Camp Onibar (for boys) and Camp Geneva (for girls) were located in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. My parents had wealthy friends who sent their daughter to camp there. The camps were founded and run by the Rabino family. Onibar is Rabino (pronounced ra-bee-no) spelled backward. [Just incidentally, Rabino is Spanish for “rabbi.”] By the time I came to the camp in 1951, Mom and Pop Rabino had died. Their three sons, Abner, Lester, and Murray, all New York lawyers in their own law firm, ran the camps, together with their wives and children. It was a year-round family enterprise.
The “clan of Rabino” was formidable. Lester was the leader of the operation. Abner was engaged in welcoming and socializing with the families who sent their children to the camp. Murray and
his family ran Camp Geneva, the girls’ camp, which was about a mile away from Onibar on a dirt road.107
To get the job of waiter, I was interviewed by “Uncle Ab” at his home in Brooklyn. I passed muster and was hired as a camperwaiter, which meant I would wait on campers, as distinct from the more senior and older guest waiters (who were college students), who served the many weekly visiting parents. The camp had a large guest house that could accommodate the 180 or so parents who came to visit their kids on weekends. Some parents even stayed there for weeks on end.
My duties as a camper-waiter involved getting up at about six a.m. on usually cold (35°F–45°F) Poconos mornings, then getting washed and dressed and into the mess hall by seven with about nine or ten other camper-waiters. We would set our tables and eat our own breakfasts from seven to eight. One waiter served the waiters (the waiters- waiter). And then at eight, the campers arrived.
Each camper-waiter served two tables that each sat about nine boys and their counselors. The campers ranged in age from four to fifteen. We brought their food from the kitchen, and once they were gone, around eight forty-five or nine, we cleaned our stations and were out of the mess hall by about nine thirty. We then washed up and changed into shorts or swim trunks and swam; played basketball, tennis, softball, or cards; or read and wrote letters, depending on the weather. We saw no TV and had no phones or computers. The latter had not yet been invented. The one public phone at the camp was in the guest house, hanging on a wall. No cell phones either.
We had to be back in the mess hall by eleven a.m. to set up, eat lunch, serve, and clean up. Usually, we were free by one thirty and had more than three hours to ourselves until dinner at five. By seven thirty p.m., we were out of the mess hall with our evenings
107. Bob Warner, first cousin by marriage of my wife, Linda, had been a waiter at Onibar before World War II. He was related to the Rabinos.
free. Five nights a week we were permitted to visit the girls’ camp. We made the one-mile trek by foot by the light of our flashlights on the dirt road separating the two camps. Once there, we socialized and danced with the female counselors, counselors in training, and waitresses.
This schedule changed somewhat from Friday dinner through Sunday lunch, when the guest waiters hired five or six of the camper-waiters to assist them as busboys for those six meals. The guest waiters decided who their busboys would be and usually chose them based on their waiting and busing skills. If you were selected as a busboy, you worked a lot harder on the weekend. When you finished waiting on your own two tables of campers, you spent the next hour or so of each meal as a busboy on the “guest side” of the dining room. While it was more work, you also made some additional money (paid to you by your guest waiter), and your chances of moving up to guest waiter in later years was enhanced by watching and learning what they did.
In my case, I worked as a camper-waiter in 1951 and 1952. My monetary compensation (other than room and board) consisted of tips from parents and counselors, which averaged about $10 each for the eight weeks of summer (which was a decent tip at that time).
In 1953, the summer before I left home for college at Brandeis, I graduated to the position of “guest waiter,” which meant that I would live in the newer and larger “bunk,” reserved for us.
The head waiter was Stan Dubin from Philadelphia. The other guest waiters were Bernie Linkoff from Baltimore, Irv Herman from Philadelphia, and Marv Sokol from Manhattan. The guest waiters served the parents of the campers when they came up to visit, usually commencing with dinner on Thursday through breakfast on Monday or Tuesday. As parents drifted in and out, our workload was increased and reduced, and we enjoyed lots of time off during midweek.
We shared our tips and kept them in cash in the safe in the camp office until the summer’s end, when we divided up our swag equally.
The guest waiters usually received from $6 to $10 for a six-meal weekend stay for a couple. Over the course of four summers, each guest waiter’s share of tips averaged about $600, which was a large sum then. Indeed, my Brandeis tuition was $700 (room and board was another $800). So my summer earnings played a major part in paying for my college education. I was awarded a $200 scholarship by Brandeis, which helped as well.
Our earnings were greatly enhanced by one guest, who routinely tipped us $25 each weekend he and his wife visited. Privately, we referred to them as the “King” and “Queen,” and we kept a favorite table vacant for them at all times, lest they arrive unexpectedly. This practice annoyed Lester Rabino, but we continued to do it nonetheless in a war of nerves with the boss. We usually prevailed, because while Lester was no “potted plant,” he seemed to feel that he ought not second-guess the head waiter on seating arrangements. Perhaps he even feared that the King might cease sending his child to the camp if his table were not reserved. At least, this was our reading of the situation. Lester would occasionally ask why the table next to his was vacant while the rest of the dining room was overflowing with guests. The head waiter would always be evasive.
For me, the best part of waiting on tables was working with the people in the kitchen: the chefs, cooks, bakers, salad makers, and dishwashers. How the Rabinos assembled the remarkable potpourri of people who turned out the meals for the campers, counselors, staff, waiters, and weekend guests, I never knew. In fact, there must have been an employment agency that specialized in finding kitchen help for summer camps: Most of the kitchen crew were salt of the earth.108 Two favorites were Nick the Greek and Joe the Turk. Fortunately, unlike their eponymous countries, they got along well.
108. One exception was Bill Johnson, the salad man, who said that it was “too bad that Hitler hadn’t finished the job” when we young Jewish waiters drank too much of the fresh orange juice he had squeezed by hand for the guests early each morning.
The boss of the kitchen was Tony Pawn, the chef who ran the operation like a field marshal. Tony was from middle Europe, probably Yugoslavia. During the off-season, he worked at a restaurant in New York City, but he spent his summers at Onibar. He was tough as nails to work for, and he would not countenance any “monkey business” on the part of the waiters, of which we were duly capable. His character was impeccable, and he was decent, principled, and generous to a fault. His wife and teenage daughter lived with him at the camp (the waiters knew that it would have been ill-advised to be seen talking with her).
Again, Stan Dubin was the head waiter, or “hedda waiter,” so named because when Tony was having trouble with a waiter, he’d yell: “I’m gonna talk to the hedda waiter and maybe also Lester Rabino about you.”
Many of the waiters had been campers at Onibar, and so “moving up” from camper to waiter was something of a rite de passage. For others, like me, it was an entry into a new world. I knew not a soul and had never worked in a kitchen, but I made friends quickly among the waiters, staff, counselors, and campers, and I did the job successfully.
One of my lifelong friends, Ira Glick, was a second-year camper during my first year as a waiter. I knew him then, but we became truly close in later years, when we worked as camper and guest waiters together and lived in the same bunk. Our friendship remained strong, even when Ira was selected as “hedda waiter” and I was bypassed. Among other things, Ira and I were both only children, and not having had siblings, we were, and still are, like brothers. Ira became a distinguished psychiatrist, married twice, first to Annie, herself a psychiatrist. They had two children, now grown. After Ira and Annie were divorced, he married Juannie Eng. They have two children, also now grown. Ira and Juannie live in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Ira is retired from the faculty of Stanford Medical School
and travels and lectures extensively on psychopharmacology. He turned eighty-six in 2021.
Another friend I made early on at Onibar was Garry Marshall. Garry was one of the two bellhops who worked at the guesthouse. His father made commercial films, and his mother ran a dancing school in the Bronx. His parents were friends of Abner and Bea Rabino (“Uncle Ab and Aunt Bea”). His sister Ronnie was a counselor at Geneva, and his sister Penny (then about eleven) was a camper there. Garry was an excellent athlete, but also very theatrical, musical, and comical. One summer he wrote a “Waiters’ Show,” which we had great fun in performing for the camp. The opening number went
We’re your waiters; We serve you your meat and potaters; So tell your maters; To tip, tip, tip the waiters.
After graduating from Northwestern, Garry went on to a brilliant career in television as a writer for The Dick Van Dyke Show and as creator of Happy Days, Mork & Mindy, and Laverne & Shirley, in which his sister Penny starred. He also made his mark on the big screen, directing movies such as Frankie and Johnny and Pretty Woman. In addition, Garry acted in a number of his own movies, as well as in such TV shows as Murphy Brown. Garry cast Ira Glick in three of his movies. In Frankie and Johnny, Ira played a character named Mutzie Calish and even spoke a line; Ira also played an immigration passenger in Exit to Eden and Dr. Glunk (a ball guest) in The Princess Diaries. Linda and I last saw Garry in 2015 in Los Angeles. He died in 2016.
Another well-known Onibarite who was a counselor in my day was Bob Caro. He has written, and is still writing, his acclaimed multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.
A camper who was about five years younger than me was Steve Solarz. He followed me to Brandeis. In later years, Steve was elected to Congress from Brooklyn (as a Democrat, of course) and told me that his election was his greatest thrill since being elected “Buff Leader” in the Onibar Buff and Blue color war. In a distinguished career in Congress, Steve chaired the House International Relations Subcommittee on Africa and played a major role in pressuring the South African government to end apartheid. Steve died in 2010.
What is remarkable to me wasn’t the fame and fortunes that many of my fellow Onibarites would go on to achieve—talented as they were—but the stark contrast with my previous camp experience at Kinderland. Though they had some things in common, the two camps largely existed in separate worlds. For instance, Camp Kinderland served mainly lower-middle- and working-class families, while the “class” of the Onibar clientele was decidedly “upper-middle” to “lower-upper” class, by financial standards. The parents of Onibar campers were mostly business people, judges, lawyers, doctors, accountants, Wall Street brokers, investment bankers, and real estate barons. (I remember Peter Kalikow, who has been a New York real estate and newspaper mogul and a public official, as a scrawny tenyear-old slowly munching on his meals every day.) In many ways, this was a new group to me. Although two of my parents’ friends were lawyers, and I had been seen by doctors who made house calls, I had never really crossed paths with professionals before.
Both camps’ clientele were overwhelmingly Jewish, but secular. The camps were not kept kosher, although shellfish and pork products were not served. However, politically the Onibar crowd generally were Roosevelt-Truman liberal Democrats, while the Kinderlanders mostly were Communists and fellow travelers. Moreover, Onibar was not organized around any cause, political or otherwise. Rather, it was just a place for affluent Jewish kids primarily from New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia to make friends and have a fun summer.
Like Kinderland, Camps Onibar and Geneva were “singing” camps. Its songs, however, did not involve the Spanish Civil War, the Vilna ghetto uprising, or the joys of Yiddish. Instead, they reflected the “happy go lucky” way of life of the great American celebration of the 1950s. The Rabinos hired accomplished musicians, songwriters, and stage directors as counselors, and each week a different camper group put on a theatrical performance for the entire camp. The music was original, and there is an entire repertoire of OnibarGeneva songs going back to the 1930s. Anyone who ever came near the camp could do a rendition of “Dear Onibar” or “The Clan of Rabino.” Two of the more accomplished musical graduates of the camps were “Moose” Charlip, who wrote the Broadway musical Peter Pan (“I Gotta Crow,” made famous by Mary Martin), and Marvin Hamlisch, the multiple-Oscar-winning composer and impresario.
But there were also ways that the clientele of Onibar turned away from things that I believed were important. At Onibar, there “seldom was heard a Yiddish word”; it was as if leaving Yiddish behind was a part of rising up the social and economic ladder. By contrast, at Kinderland, we revered Yiddish as mamme loshen (“mother tongue”). I remember this lovely little song, written by a counselor, that we often sang:
Yiddish rets zich azoi schoen; Yiddish is do mala chein; A shule, a klastsimer, a tish; Mer darf mir nischt; Lomir alle tzuzamin redin Yiddish.
Loosely translated:
The sound of Yiddish is so lovely; Yiddish is a great joy to us; A school, a classroom, a table;
That’s all we need; Let’s all speak Yiddish together.
Having heard, spoken, and sung in Yiddish at home and at Kinderland, and knowing the culture and history it represents, I consider its abandonment as part of the escape from immigrant and European origins, regrettable though understandable. In contrast, my lifelong interest in Yiddish represents a longing for my childhood and our collective past. As we know, languages are vast repositories of cultures.
In retrospect, I spent forty-eight weeks over six summers waiting on tables (occasionally, I would also work as a waiter at resorts in the Catskills during Jewish High Holy Days). These experiences gave me a lifetime’s worth of respect for people who work with their hands and with their heads,109 serving others their food. Indeed, when I later went to work as a lawyer for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (UNITE HERE), I always felt a special personal kinship with its members.
Working at Onibar also expanded my world in many respects. I met, worked, and played with young adults who were at Ivy League and other “out-of-town” colleges or on their way. I am certain that the idea of going to an out-of-town college was born for me at Onibar, while I listened to friends talking about their college experiences.
109. See Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
