It must have been quite pastoral back in July 1938 when Isaac Bashevis Singer first glimpsed the bungalow colony grounds after a long, tedious drive from Manhattan. He might have stood at the entrance off the narrow serpentine road, beneath a jade-green canopy of tall, resin-scented cedars. Ahead of him lay a flowing, even more verdant landscape rising sharply into a series of tree-studded hills. But Singer must surely have questioned what he was doing in this "wilderness" so far from his tiny, one-room flat in lower Manhattan and why he'd allowed his young friend, Zygmunt Salkin, to inveigle him into journeying up to the country.

Maurice Schwartz's grand and noble Yiddish Art Theatre, established in 1918 at Manhattan's Irving Place Theatre with high hopes and higher aspirations, with plays by stellar Yiddish playwrights such as Perez Hirshbein and David Pinski, had, over the next two decades, devolved into offering a menu of mostly lighter, crowd-pleasing fare still Yiddish in language, but grandiose in production, the stage often filled chock-a-block with actors, singers, and dancers, the choreography ornate, the scenes many in order to boost attendance. Schwartz had become what noted actress Celia Adler called "a slave to spectacle."

Jacob Ben-Ami's Jewish Art Theatre, with even loftier aims, had lasted two seasons, from 1919 to 1921. By the thirties, all that remained of Yiddish theater was ARTEF (Arbeiter Teater Farband), a vibrant but leftist group more interested in propaganda than artistry.

And, of course, there was the Second Avenue fluff of sentimental comedies, overcooked melodramas and mindless musicals, known collectively and pejoratively as shund, which purist critics defined as trash.

In 1937, the great author-critic Alexander Mukdoiny wrote, "The Yiddish Theatre is finished. It is no longer even bad theatre. It has no actor, no repertoire, no directors and no designers.... Professionalism, talent and ambition are practically dead."

Zygmunt Salkin's attempt at a solution that summer of 1938 was to gather a group of stage-struck youngsters and present them with his own English translation of the I. L. Peretz play, to be produced under Singer's guidance. The practical part of his agenda was the free use by the troupe of a gathering hall in the bungalow colony known as Grine Felder (Green Fields). But this was no ordinary Catskill resort for the families of middle-class Jewish shopkeepers and businessmen who would come for a respite from Manhattan's swelter. When Salkin and Singer arrived, Grine Felder had been for two years summer home to the most concentrated assemblage of Yiddishist elite anywhere on Earth. While other groups--artists, leftists, Bohemians--organized their own colonies, none equaled the caliber of talent at Grine Felder.
Indeed, not anyone could vacation at the unique colony. Malvina Fainberg, 93, a summer resident from 1947 to 1987, describes the admission practices:
"There was a long waiting list, composed of only those recommended by Grine Felders already there. I was considered because my brother-in-law [Jules Fainberg] was one of the original founders. One had to be first interviewed, parents and children alike, by the membership committee. Next, we were evaluated by the cultural committee as to his or her possible contribution to the various cultural activities going on."

The colony's origins are almost mythic. In the autumn of 1936, a delegation from nearby Mirth bungalow colony had approached Raphael Kasofsky and Meyer Arkin, owners of the popular Avon Lodge a mile outside of Woodridge. Representing thirty-two families dissatisfied with their present summer accommodations, the delegates asked the two owners to build them a modern enclave of approximately forty units on thirty-five acres of unused Avon Lodge property. The group would then assume all aspects of managing the colony, from maintaining the grounds to collecting the rents and paying the owners' fees.

By the next spring, the spanking new colony was ready for occupancy. Its name would be Grine Felder, after the enormously successful play and movie by Perez Hirshbein, who was among the colony's founding fathers. At the eleventh hour, however, Hirshbein decided to remain at Mirth, out of loyalty to its owner.

Those making the transition couldn't have been more pleased with the two- and four-unit structures, its modern kitchens and screened porches, and the large recreational building which they promptly named the Amphion Theatre and stocked with rows of benches and three massive Melodigrand pianos. .

Samuel Charney, who wrote under the name "S. Niger," was also an original at the colony. Editor, journalist and historian, founder of the Zionist Socialist Party and president of the Shalom Aleichem Folk Institute, Charney was considered the dean of Yiddish literary criticism.

He writes of Grine Felder’s children putting on a performance of Robert Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, followed by a more Yiddish-centered production of I. L. Peretz’s Two Brothers.

Under Shiffrin’s direction, the parents of these children presented another Peretz play, Arendar, a stirring three-acter. Other evenings, David Pinski would command the Amphion stage with talks about the lives and works of his fel­low artists: the two Sholems, Asch and Aleichem; Peretz; and Ossip Dymov.

Wednesday evenings were especially glittering. The women's cultural committee would take charge of "Tea Parties," at which Lazar Weiner would often play an original composition or accompany an invited guest such as Alexander Zadri, the world-renowned violinist. They'd play Mozart and Brahms, but more frequently Yiddish folk music.

At another Wednesday gala Jacob Ben-Ami, the quintessential Yiddish actor, would give a dramatic reading. At another, the great Russian basso Sidor Belarsky, a recent immigrant and star of the City Center Opera Company, would sing solo or duets with Moishe Radinow to the accompaniment of the Melodigrand piano.

Refreshments would be served after, and the conversation was rich and heady--the fate of European Jewry; the tense situation in Palestine; the paintings of Marc Chagall; the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, which badly splintered the left; the American economy, still ailing from the Depression.

 In addition, Shiffrin noted that "we have a reading circle in Yiddish, to which about thirty residents come each Tuesday, in the open meadows, to listen to readings of works from our Yiddish classics."

In his journal, Shiffrin also tells of the colony's own weekly newsletter, The Locust, a breezy two-pager that he edited and to which Elkin, Pinski, Niger, and other Grine Felders were happy to contribute.

Involved in his directorial and re-editing chores, I. B. Singer nevertheless took note of his hosts. In Lost in America he recalls with amusement that each bungalow was named for a Yiddish writer or Socialist leader: Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman.

But, sourly, Singer carps that "when the Yiddishists learned that I was getting ready to dramatize something by Peretz ...I became an overnight target. Yiddishism in America suffered from a lack of young forces. I was comparatively young, and my book (Satan in Goray) had already received some notice among the Yiddishists, even though the critics complained that I failed to follow in the path of Yiddish classicists and gave myself over exclusively to sex, as well as demonstrating a lack of concern for social problems."

This being the case, it is difficult to imagine two more antagonistic extremes in the spectrum of Yiddish literary culture. Singer, always the self-absorbed loner, demonstrated his antipathy to the Grine Felders in this acid-etched group portrait: "They seethed with those offering ready­made remedies for all the world's ills ... Some placed all their hopes on Freud, while others hinted that Stalin was hardly as bad as the capitalist lackeys painted him."
By summer's end, though but a novice at directing, Singer had helped whip into shape At Night in the Old Marketplace on the Amphion's stage, when unused by the Grine Felders. Salkin talked of receiving financial backing and booking a theater in Manhattan, but neither materialized. Peretz's anglicized play never opened.

Grine Felder, however, continued for almost fifty more years, despite the deaths or the defections of its most illustrious founders and the shift to more mainstream families. In 1973 a neighboring ski lodge bought the colony and ran it for five years; eventually it fell into bankruptcy. Finally, the town of Fallsburg took the colony in lieu of unpaid taxes.

The grandeur and glory of Grine Felder is forever gone, in ruins like so many Catskill resorts and hotels. Its Amphion Theatre, the site of so much poetry, drama, and music has collapsed into itself, only the three pianos remaining upright, their keys faded and frozen tight, their rotting hulks evidently not worth stripping or stealing.

The bungalows themselves are slowly rotting, the screened porches festooned with cobwebs, the kitchens gutted except for corkscrews of flypaper still hanging from ceiling beams, their victims long ago turned to fossils.

Nature has all but reclaimed Grine Felder, leaving scant indication of what a bountiful feast had once taken place there, summer after joyous summer: An extraordinary band of Yiddishists had endeavored to hold onto a fast vanishing world while America was struggling with its own problems of the Great Depression and later, World War II; when the stars shone a bit brighter and Grine Felder was the closest its founders would ever come to paradise on Earth.