Summer Joins the Past: Photographs of Deserted, Abandoned, and Vacant Jewish Summer Camps

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 603–614 Summer Joins the Past Photographs of Deserted, Abandoned, and Vacant Jewish Summer Camps ALBERT J. WINN Cabin, Summer Camp, Maine. Gelatin-silver print, 8.5⬙ ⳯ 8⬙ (2002). SUMMER CAMP was once an important part of the cultural landscape of the Jewish adolescent experience in the United States. Camps provided The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 604 JQR 94:4 (2004) a sense of community and reinforced group identity, engendered their own allegiances, and fostered networks of relationships that extended into adulthood. Started in the early years of the twentieth century as a refuge from congested slums, summer camps became vehicles for assimilation into the American mainstream, combining Native American and American folklore, sports, and arts and crafts in a Jewish cultural setting. Although often privately owned, and as such considered secular, many camps were owned and operated by Jewish religious and communal organizations and reflected the orientation of the sponsor or owner. For the entire summer, camp became an ideal community of children, removed from home and parents: a mythological place of friendship, achievement, romance, and promise. Although camps still exist, they reached their heyday in the 1950s and ’60s. The photographs shown here are of summer camps from a variety of locations throughout North America. Part of a larger body of work, they address the issues of memory, nostalgia, loss, and myth associated with landscape. In Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), Simon Schama addresses the notion that mythology imbued in certain places creates metaphor that is greater than its references. The myths that surround summer camp, like those of any other place that represents an ideal, have a resiliency greater than the actual experience, and as such become constructs of metaphor . The memories of sports and romance, color war competitions and musicals, campfires and pranks, canoe trips and hikes, the pandemonium of the dining hall, the simple beauty of Friday evening services, are profound experiences that become embedded in our minds. Free of parental and school strictures, they grew larger in our memories as time passed. No one, it seems, has a neutral response to summer camp. Reactions to my project have ranged from amused to wistful, joyous to horrified. Everyone is awash in memory, even those seemingly rare individuals who didn’t go to camp. When I told others of my project, I was often implored to find someone’s camp. Stories abound of a first kiss, homesickness, color war. I heard particular remembrances such as Labor Zionist campers fighting Betarniks in the camp on the other side of the lake, and red diaper campers attending the civil rights march on Washington. The handsomest boy and the prettiest girl became godlike in people’s memories ; the musicals and the campers who sang and acted in them were all destined for Broadway. The response to the photographs has always been positive, but one alltoo -common reaction was that the images seemed to evoke the Holocaust. When I first visited camp sites, I recognized immediately the potential for that response. Images of deserted, abandoned, and vacant buildings, SUMMER JOINS THE PAST—WINN 605 Interior, Girls’ Cabin, Summer Camp, Pocono Mountains. Gelatin-silver print, 8.5⬙ ⳯ 8⬙ (2000). particularly in a Jewish context, seem inevitably to conjure the memory of the devastation of European Jewry. In a sense, those observations may be a comment on the lens through which Americans understand the Jewish experience. It is a result of our historic and collective memory. It seems that in the post–World War II mind, our language and our vision have been so deeply scarred that even to say the word ‘‘camp’’ elicits a momentary vision of barracks, showers, and mass murder. Though it has never been my intention to make Holocaust art, I hope that my images challenge that notion. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in summer camps. After years of rising intermarriage rates, free trips to Israel, programs to maintain continuity (a term that seems open to...