Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Americana: The Story of Grossinger’s

Tania Grossinger’s childhood was the stuff of modern fairytales. Like a version of Kay Thomson’s Plaza Hotel-dwelling Eloise by way of “Dirty Dancing,” Grossinger grew up largely unsupervised at the famed Catskills hotel that shares her family’s name. She catalogs her exploits, many of which involve some combination of mischief and Borscht Belt celebrities, in “Growing Up at Grossinger’s” (Skyhorse Publishing), a memoir first published in 1975 and reissued this year.

LEGACY: Jackie and Rachel Robinson with Karla, Tania Grossinger?s mother, at the famed Catskills hotel.

Grossinger was born in Chicago in 1937, and at age 8 was whisked away to the Catskills by her mother, a member of the hotelier clan first by marriage and then, after her husband died, by economic necessity. In Tania’s telling, the “owner Grossingers” treated her and her mother, who took a job at the hotel, as second-class citizens — but that rarely interfered with her penchant for hijacking rowboats, intercepting guests’ budding romances and palling around with such celebrity visitors as Eddy Fisher, Rocky Marciano and Jackie Robinson.

“Danny Kaye never tipped,” she writes in a typical anecdote about baby-sitting for the stars’ children. “In fact, he still owes me 75 cents.”

Robinson, on the other hand, presented her with a custom-made cake when she was accepted to Brandeis University.

According to Grossinger, her family’s hotel was, in its heyday, home to some 1,000 guests each week. But it dwindled in size and prestige by the late 1960s because of the rise of jet travel, increased opportunities for young, single Jews to meet without the support of an enormous hotel staff behind them, and the advent of television variety shows that paid entertainers more for a five-minute appearance than the hotel did for a whole weekend.

But Catskills hotel culture remains a source of fascination even for those who never experienced it, Grossinger told the Forward.

“It’s Americana,” she said, adding that the executive director of The Catskills Institute, who is also a professor at Brown University, taught a class on the subject several years ago. “And this was not in Jewish studies, it was in sociology. They used my book as part of the course — be still my heart.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.