The Borscht Belt

In New York's Catskill Mountains a party began in the twentieth century that lasted decades. Party pictures filled thousands of scrapbooks—but now the party’s over and the guests are gone, never to return. Enter Marisa Scheinfeld, whose camera finds profound eloquence in the silence that remains and hope in new life emerging from the ruins. This story was already ancient when Shelley penned "Ozymandias": that all things grand eventually fall. But Scheinfeld’s work is all the more moving because these things are ours now.

-- Alan Weisman * Countdown and The World without Us *

Photographer Marisa Scheinfeld has documented the end of the great resorts in The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland, which features page after page of photos of waterless, cracking pools, dirt-caked floors, weathered and withered wooden cottages, gashed ceilings and gushing insulation, graffiti-bedecked walls, rows of bereft beach emptiness where there had once been fullness. Scheinfeld’s photos remind one of the old Catskills’ theme of nature despoiled, a contemporary counterpart to the desolate final painting in Cole’s The Course of Empire.

-- Neal Gabler * Jewish Review of Books *

Those structures that haven't been repurposed as meditation centers or rehab facilities have fallen into that beguiling realm neither humanity nor nature can produce alone, with wild vegetation blurring, bending, and breaking the rigid geometries of civilization. The book notes Woody Allen's quip, no doubt delivered at some point from a Borscht Belt stage: 'Eighty percent of success is showing up.' Some might say that Scheinfeld arrived half a century too late, but her photos reveal that she showed up just in time to discover mutable beauty in tumbledown dreams.

-- R. C. Baker * Village Voice *

All of the photographs in The Borscht Belt are remarkable, but I find myself agreeing with [essayist] Jenna Weissman Joselit that one thing they make clear is that 'Mother Nature has the last laugh' (25). Whether it is a tree growing through a bench, or the grass growing over what was once luxurious wall-to-wall carpet, or snowdrifts inside walls built to keep weather out, Scheinfeld's collection proves that in the end, nature will find a way. Where once there was so much life, now there is death, seen through the bones and feathers that mark the nests of small predators. But even that is a sign of new life in its own way, and Scheinfeld beautifully illustrates that death and life are never far apart,

-- Jennifer Caplan * Reading Religion *

A beautiful series of visual compositions designed to evoke the experience of America's early Jewish communities which rose from the immigrant ghettos of New York City to enjoy the mobile lifestyles so popular at the height of the modern era.

* NEW YORK HISTO