“A Microcosm of the Afterlife”
July 9th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
My review of Four Seasons Lodge, a documentary about Holocaust survivors who vacation at the same bungalow colony in the Catskills, appears in this week’s issue of The Jewish Press.
Here’s a selection:
“Four Seasons Lodge” is not your typical Holocaust documentary. On the one hand, there is the plot of the people who survived the death camps now struggling to save their summer camp, which they call “our paradise in the mountains.” Meanwhile, these individuals are straight out of the “Twilight Zone”: a quickly fading demographic clinging to a summer lifestyle that seems to have outlived its usefulness. Though bungalow communities initially offered New Yorkers a way to flee the city’s hot summers, today’s air conditioning and more globalized travel ambitions have left bungalows to become ghost towns. But ghost towns apparently are very welcoming to people haunted by ghosts.