AN AMERICAN JEWISH VACATION PATTERN:

THE ACCOMMODATION OF CONJUGAL TENSIONS*

Leonard Plotnicov

University of Pittsburgh

In a previous article (Plotnicov 1968) I addressed myself to

the issue of role changes among the members of American Jewish families
as a consequence of migration from Eastern Europe. Particularly, that

paper focussed on the structural weaknesses within the conjugal relation-

ship and the potentiality for the generation of strains within the husband-
wife situation.  However, if that argument was logical it is still contra-
dicted by a nmost embarrassing fact; the population described has an

exceptionally low rate of divorce and separation (Seligman and Antonovsky
1958:61, 92). Assuming the validity of my analysis it then becomes nec-

essary to carry the examination further and to ask why spouses remain to-
gether when there are strong forces pushing them apart.

Many explanations can be offered to account for marital stability
in this population.  Granting this, the present Daver will not attempt a
survey of eufunctional factors. Rather, it will describe only one such
element that, to my knowledge, has not previously received attention in

this regard.  Tt is a pattern of summer vacation behavior, associated with
American Jews which, I suggest, is a cultural means of relieving the pres-
sure of tensions that is built up between husband and wife.'

It is no mere coincidence that the Jewish summer vacation pat-

tern, with the development of resorts specially catering to Jews, had its
beginnings around the turn of the century and coincided with the initial
attainment of middle-class status by Eastern European Jews in the United

States. Although Jews from other parts of Europe had been present in the
United States in moderate numbers since the eighteenth century, and had
frequently risen to high position, their general behavior followed that

of gentiles and they did not develop summer vacation resorts. The Eastern
European Jews had been in the United States for roughly a generation before

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Jewish resorts began to appear on a large scale (Baltzell 1958:281-282;
Boroff 1958:57; Gordon 1949:222ff.; Rosenberg 1954:206-207; Seely, Sim

and Loosley 1956:78-80; Weinryb 1958:20; Wirth 1928:268-269). The example
of vacationing used here is that of the Catskill Mountains of New York
State. It is the one I am most familiar with, but the features I shall
deal with are common for Jewish resorts elsewhere in the United States.
Boroff succinctly describes the setting:

A region of high meadows and woodland.... Today the term
"The Catskills" means pre-eminently a vast playground for
hundreds of thousands of New York City Jews....

Actually the vacation area--known variously as "the

Borscht circuit," "the mountains" (although in this section
of the region they rarely exceed 2,000 feet).. .consists of

1,000 square miles of green and pleasant countryside about 100
miles from New York City. Here almost 500 hotels and 2,000

bungalow colonies...have sprung up. And here, during the sum-

mer, more than 2,000,000 souls swarm over the hills and valleys.
The 40,000 permanent residents--farmers and shopkeepers--now
make their living largely from the summer business (1958:56).

During the summer the normal Jewish community is divided: the
women and children at the resorts and the men in the city. Except for

weekends, the women at the resorts far outnumber the men and, significantly,
the men present tend to have less social importance than the women resi-

dents. Except for the husbands--whose visits are limited to weekends and
their period of vacation leave--these men are either employed to perform

services, or are non-wage earners (temporarily without a job and accepting
unemployment compensation), or old men who may be invalid or sick, and the
older boys, regarded as immature males. The summer Jewish community is
largely a women's community--it is they who form the important links in
the summer community's social network. The choice of the place of the
summer residence also rests with them.

The vacation may last as long as ten weeks, or even longer for

some residents. Vacationists live in bungalows, in small apartments (ac-
tually single rooms with kitchen privileges), or at a hotel where board

is included in the rates. Once the family summer household has been set
up, the routine is the same from day to day except for the heightened

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activity on the weekends when "most men come careening up on Friday evening
and take part in the enervating crawl homeward on Sunday night. Meanwhile
their wives have purchased a summer of total leisure.... The mothers are
free to resume a camaraderie-of-the-girls that they have abandoned in

adolescence.... The women sit around together in a kind of all-day coffee
break" (Boroff 1958:62).

It is difficult to determine the extent to which the men might

look forward to the summer release from their wives, but even if they view
the break as a release, there is no doubt they are also lonely. Philan-
dering, however, seems not to be common. The week in the city is spent

watching television, or sitting in conversation with other men in front of
their houses, in parks, or over tea at a cafeteria. If some men antici-
pate relief from their wives, the very thought of such improper behavior
might well serve to heighten the guilt feelings they harbor.2

I know of no sociological research in this area, so I am forced

to seek corroboration for my observations and interpretations from writings
in fiction. The following quote is from an autobiographical account of

Philip Roth in which he writes of his boyhood experience at a New Jersey
seaside resort not far from New York City:

Usually he [father] took off the last week in July and
the first in August; otherwise he would stay in the city

during the week and drive down on weekends. Sometimes [he
would come in the middle of the week when] ... the city was
too hot. "You can't even breathe," he tells my mother.
"The humidity," she'd say.

On these surprise visits he would usually arrive about
seven-thirty without having had dinner....

All my ideas of how difficult it was to be a man, to work

and support a family, seem to me to have come, not so much from
being told about the difficulties, as from observing the kinds
of relaxation the difficulties let you into: as for work, it

made you want to pour a handful of cool water on your face and

neck, it made such a simple thing a pleasure.... I had no clear
idea...of what he did. What did he do during the day? And

when we were away what did he do at night? Who did he listen
to the radio with? He missed us--I was sure of that--and

though he would never indulge his loneliness, it must have

pleased him when the day's temperature and humidity became so

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unbearable that he felt justified in fleeing the city for the
night [my italics]. He paid, most of the time, however, in
money and in loneliness for our comfort. The heat in the

summer was the enemy of women and children--we had to be saved
from it (1959:47-48).

The end of this quote alludes to one of the more important cultural

rationales that serves to support the family's removal to the country

during the hot summer months: health. The city, where the husband re-

mains, is considered an unhealthy place as well as an extremely uncomfor-
table place during the summer. The least a man can or should do is to

preserve the health of his family. The family's summer vacation holds a
position of foremost priority in the allocation of the Jewish family

budget. By providing for his family's vacation a man also demonstrates

his ability to fulfill one of his roles as father and husband--the obli-
gation to give his wife and children a comfortable standard of living.

But the cost of a family's summer vacation is no small sum. I have esti-

mated that a man may spend between 10 and 20 per cent of his annual income
to provide his family with a summer vacation. This estimate is based on
interviews conducted during the summer of 1959 when I was told that, de-
pending on the lavishness of accommodations, length of stay, number of

persons in the family, number of weekend visits, and so on, vacation costs
ranged from a minimum of six hundred dollars to "over four thousand." One
cannot entirely rely on these figures, for in many cases there was the

deliberate attempt to impress me with inflated annual incomes and summer
expenditures. Nonetheless, the cost cannot be slight.

There are costs other than monetary that accrue during the ten
weeks to three months when husband is separated from wife and children.
It is realized by all participants that the Jewish husband-fathers make

personal sacrifices during the summer for their families. It is they who
must live and work in the hot, humid, and "unhealthy" city so that their

wives and children may have the ease, comfort, and "health" of the country.
The husbands must, in addition to their normal routine of work, perform
those tasks for which they ordinarily depend on their wives--cooking,

housekeeping, etc. They are also deprived of emotional support from their

57

wives, and they miss their children. This situation exists even for

those families who go to the seashore rather than to the country. These

seaside places are rarely more than an hour away by public transportation
from the family's place of residence in the city, and yet the pattern of
vacationing is similar: the husband remains in the city while his wife
and children live by the shore.

During the summer vacation, Jewish women are in a position of
power not so clearly manifest during the remainder of the year. Even

more significant, with regard to the primary concern of this paper, is the
cathartic suffering and purging that men undergo each summer. I have
heard some men complain in a self-pitying way about their difficulties

during the summer, particularly stressing the household chores and their
loneliness, as though these tribulations were a form of self-exoneration
or expiation for any residues of guilt, and the complaints themselves a
necessary part of the process of public atonement.

For the many reasons given, a man is anxious to be with his

family in the country. Ideally he will visit them each weekend. His wife
will also urge him to come, not only because it is proper for her to do

so, but also because the strong emotional ties that do exist between them
come to the surface during the periods of their separation. The high
points of the family's summer are the weekly weekend reunions when the

family members play out their roles as if following a culturally normative
script. They bring to their social interaction an almost stylized be-

havior that emphasizes the salient features of their values and the points
of strain in the family system. The following is a generalized account of
what takes place.

The husband's weekend migration to the vacation resort follows
a regular pattern. He leaves the city immediately after work on Friday
without pausing to rest or eat, despite the knowledge that under heavy

traffic conditions his arrival will be considerably delayed. Prior to the
opening of the New York State Thruway and connecting super-highways to the
Catskill area, such trips could take from four to six hours and even longer

58

They now usually take about three hours. The man generally returns to

the city on Sunday evening or early Monday morning. His arrival in the

country on Friday night is marked by a quasi-ritualized behavior pattern,

the composite acts of which carry great symbolic importance to the partic-
ipants.   As each husband arrives, his wife meets him and greets him with
a kiss. (Jewish couples otherwise rarely display demonstrations of affec-

tion in public.) The wife will have taken pains to make herself attractive
and has prepared a substantial and inviting meal. The children will run
to meet their father, one of them taking pride in carrying his overnight
bag, and the couple follow arm-in-arm with the wife bringing her husband
to the waiting supper. These acts clearly signify what are regarded as

the proper and good things in life, how the family members should behave
and feel toward one another. The good meal has a special significance,

for among Jews it does not merely indicate good relations; it especially
connotes love, particularly mother's love. In the context of the Jewish
family, when food is heartily accepted, it signifies the acceptance and

reciprocation of this love. In the stylized behavior of the summer Friday
night, the evening meal also signifies that the wife has accepted her hus-

band as the man with whom she has cast her fate and that she has no regrets.

The little domestic drama that is played out underscores the

temporary resolution of the couple's marital difficulties. It is apparent
in the wife's display of concern for her husband's welfare, by her enquir-
ies about all the possible things that could have troubled him during the
week in the city or on the trip up to the country--frustrations in his

work, illness, weather conditions in the city, heavy traffic on the road
to the resort, etc. She will also tell him how much the children have
missed him and will hint she is sexually available to him. Of course,

there are individual variations in such behavior, but the broad outlines
of this pattern remain the same for most couples.

The effect of this drama is to recapitulate for the husband all
his summer deprivations, yet the wife's show of concern helps to bridge

the gulfs created between them in the course of their married life together.

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The effects of marital erosion are momentarily overcome. The wife's re-

cognition of her husband's discomfort during the summer, as compared with
her own ease, not only permits her a harmless release of hostile and

aggressive impulses toward her husband, it also permits a similar cathar-
sis for her husband.  He, believing that he has suffered and sacrificed
himself for his family, can now feel relieved of his own anxieties re-

garding his adequacy, and his wife's demonstration of.affection and accep-
tance on these Friday night reunions helps further to free him of any
feelings of guilt.

The length of time involved in the separation of husband and

wife--almost a quarter of the year--must in itself provide a respite from
the tensions engendered in Jewish marital life.   In addition, the periodic
family reunion ceremonies on the summer weekends, although not providing

a permanent resolution of marital conflicts, do prevent the overt expres-
sion of built-up hostilities that might otherwise eventually result in an
intolerable situation. By being periodically discharged through cultur-

ally acceptable behaviors, the potentially disruptive strains are rendered
ineffectual, and thus the means are provided for the maintenance of con-
jugal stability.

In presenting this hypothesis several caveats should be raised.

The first is that the vacation pattern described is no longer so prevalent
among contemporary American Jews, but is a more accurate description of a
previous generation. Secondly, even if one could validate the socio-

psychological functional relationship between the vacation pattern and

conjugal stability--defined as low rates of divorce and separation--there
is no way of measuring the relative significance of this method of "ca-
tharsis" with other operating factors that achieve the same ends. Addi-
tionally, it would be difficult to determine the extent to which the

vacation pattern outlined is statistically significant for the population
as a whole, that is, what percentage actually behaved this way. What I

have described is a statement about culture that is not subject to testing
by quantitative measures. But there are ways of qualitatively testing the

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hypothesis, and one of these is to examine similar conditions among other

groups, which may be ethnic, social class, etc. By the comparative method
we could test for the concordance of similar conditions and resultants.
That is the final caveat--the comparison has not been made and I hope
someone will do it.  It is a nice way to spend your field work.

NOTES

* This paper originally formed part of an article that recently
appeared in this journal (Plotnicov 1968), and so the acknowledgements of
aid expressed there equally apply here. However, not mentioned then was
the financial aid given me by the Department of Anthropology at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, enabling me to conduct research during
the summer of 1959, in the resort area of New York State described here.
Additional data were collected during the summers of 1949 through 1954,
when I was employed there.

1 I was originally stimulated to look into this relationship by
a sociology instructor, when I was an undergraduate. When I once told

him of the summer vacation pattern I was familiar with, he considered it
remarkable that Jewish spouses could, as a result, be separated for
periods of almost a quarter of a year.

2

I am grateful to George DeVos for pointing this out to me!

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1958

Edward D.

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Boroff, David

1958    The Catskills: still having a wonderful time.    Harper's 217:

56-63.

Gordon, Albert I.

1949    Jews in Transition.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.

61

Plotnicov, Leonard

1968    First and second generation American Jewish families:

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1954    The Jewish Community in Rochester, 1843-1925.    New York:

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