The Golden Hotel is one of the last remaining hotels of the famed Borscht Belt, the Catskill Mountains where mostly Jews from the NY area would head to each summer. Think Dirty Dancing. The story takes place in 2018, about 60 years after Amos Weingold and Benny Goldman built the Golden Hotel from the ground up. Benny has recently died, the Catskills are no longer drawing the crowd that it once did, and an offer to buy the hotel has been made by a casino developer. Should the families sell the hotel? Try to keep it?
Three generations of the families gather together at the hotel to make their decision. In the process, stories of days gone by are shared, family secrets are brought to the forefront, and family relationships are tested. I really enjoyed the differences between the generations - and between the various characters within a single generation.
As I was reading, I thought back upon my two trips to the Catskills. Once was in the early 1960s. My dad was chaperoning a college trip and he got to bring the family along. I remember that the college kids loved having my younger brother and me around. The hotel we stayed at closed in 1967 so that hotel must have been reaching its tipping point. I went back with my (then) husband and some friends in the early 1980s. We stayed at the Concord, one of the hotels that managed to hold on the longest. I remember sitting in the dining room and basically ordering everything on the menu - simply because that's what you could do! I don't remember activities or entertainment, what the Borscht Belt hotels were most famous for. Well, that and the obscene quantity of food served nearly all day long!
If you're old enough to remember when summer vacations were something completely different from what they are today, you will probably enjoy this easy to read novel, too.
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