Circle Lodge

We're going up to Circle Lodge tomorrow.  Here's something I wrote about the place two years ago, on a similar trip. 

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You can’t find Circle Lodge, the Dutchess County, NY resort established by the Workmen’s Circle in 1927, on Trip Advisor. I’ve tried and failed to add it there, in an attempt to forestall its imminent passage into American Jewish history.  

It would be a major mitzveh.  You only need enough people under 75 to find kindred spirits among the guests you meet there today – the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Arbeiter Ring’s Yiddishist, socialist founders.  With that fresh blood, the place could and should survive a bit longer, embracing a few more generations in its liberal, worldly Jewish literacy. 

They had a little fire in an air conditioning unit the last time
we were at Circle Lodge. We got to see some of Dutchess
County's Finest. Nobody was hurt. 

The food is great; you can gain just as much weight here as in the Catskills, which are on the other side of the Hudson and further north.  Come to think of it, Circle Lodge has outlived the Catskills that we non-Socialist Jews knew; those resorts all having closed or gone super-Orthodox.

Circle Lodge’s entertainment and cultural programming are secular Jewish, humanist and global in outlook. The lake is nice (once shared with a Jewish camp that leaned further left; they didn't speak to each other), the cottage rooms from another age but decently maintained, with screened in porches for reading and mah jongg.  And the guests, many 80-plus, are great role models: outgoing, intellectually active and curious, still sharing experiences and laughs over the table after careers spent as teachers, doctors, and other socially useful occupations.  The resort’s golf carts continually zip them from registration to cabin and up the hill to the dining hall and folk dances, movies, lectures and bridge games.

On our last two visits there, we were comped with a lakeside cabin; my husband came to give talks on topics of Jewish historical or linguistic interest.  This July about half that day’s guests attended, the rest having come for Bridge week. Yiddish Voch (Yiddish Week) is the biggest draw, a week devoted to Yiddish classes at all levels, literature and music.

The resort’s wooden buildings are large, decorated with murals and full of camp sports and cultural history, named for literary and historical greats and Workmen’s Circle luminaries known by previous generations.  The library, theater/social hall, gazebo, waterfront and one of the pools are shared with KinderRing, the children’s camp born out of the same secular Yiddish political and cultural outlook, also in 1927. 

This year I met Barnett Zumoff, 85, who had served as camp physician for over 50 years; the infirmary on the KinderRing side is named for him.  Today he’s still playing tennis and translating Yiddish poetry.  I also re-met Zisl Slepovitch, recently from Minsk and under 40.  Zisl has a Music PhD from Moscow, teaches at Brandeis and other places, speaks English, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish, and served as musical director of the latest show running in New York’s Folksbeine, the only surviving Yiddish theater in America.  

I’d first met him a month earlier, while riding Folksbeine’s float in the Salute to Israel parade down Fifth Avenue.  He was playing a mean klezmer clarinet.  I also met Helen Bloch Cooper, a pretty almost-90 actress on the Yiddish stage, who needed some help getting her email from one of the Circle Lodge computers, in the room next to the snack bar.  Most of the PC users are foreign KinderRing counselors, here for the summer, who Skype home to parents and friends.  After they sign off, the computers boot up with Cyrillic interfaces.  

An Irish-born counselor gamely tried to help Ms. Cooper get her AOL mail – she couldn’t remember her password – while she alternately showered him with thanks and apologies for her failing memory.  But the counselor wound up registering her to a whole new account, and she feared that all her messages were lost.  After he left, and with the help of AOL’s Indian tech support, I proved to her that her old account still lived.

Also at my table: two middle-aged women from Jackson Heights, Queens, who spoke Spanish and seemed a little self-conscious.  We got to chatting; one of them turned out to be the widow of a former Circle Lodge cook. She still thought it a fine place to spend a few days’ vacation, with trips to nearby Hyde Park (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family compound) and the Culinary Institute of America.  Also a couple, he 100, she 95, brought for the whole month of July by their 70-something daughter and son-in-law.  While the food is served buffet-style, the dining room staff served Max and his wife. Everyone, guests included, were eager to offer help he didn’t want. 

You also typically find a few Russian Jews.

This being a Yiddishist place, at least historically, the buffet room is decorated with posters of YiddiShpeil, the Israel-based Yiddish-language troupe. When I first came, over 10 years ago, program director Michal Baron  started our day at breakfast with a news summary in Yiddish. Michal and his wife are still working here, but this has been discontinued.  With a few holdouts, the fluent Yiddish speakers were today’s guests’ parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  But the 80-somethings’ children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren come as well, many of them KinderRing alumni.

Since I married into the Jewish left, I have no history or relatives among the regulars at Circle Lodge. But I did study Yiddish, in college.  So I know something of the philosophy and enjoy striking up conversations and poking around, in the library and at the wall hangings.