Reviving the Dancing, Sukkos: Restoring flow

Dear readers,

The following three installments together conclude the current version of Capillary Actions. It’s been so good to have you along for the ride so far.

What’s next with this project? This spring and summer I’ll be visiting several of the still-existing leftwing Jewish bungalow colonies in the Hudson Valley, to listen to their origin stories and current lives. I’ll be researching Nitgedaiget, a communist ‘resort’ in Beacon, NY, and hiking on its former lands. Nitgedaiget (Yiddish for Not to Worry) housed nearly 1000 working-class Jewish radicals a day in tents, cabins and a 4-story hotel (!!??!!) overlooking the Hudson from the 1920’s through the mid-50’s, when they were closed down by HUAC. I’ll be continuing to listen to the stories of friends from Camp Thoreau, a descendent of Camps Woodland and Higley Hill. And I’ll be learning about how to steward our acre in Goldens Bridge to help restore habitat, and continuing to learn about the Indigenous history of the Hudson Valley watershed, and current land/climate justice projects.

As this early phase of the writing comes to completion, I’d be so interested in your thoughts and comments about what you’ve been reading. And in related stories, and suggestions for other communities to include - this work is built from collective memory.

It looks like I’ll be moving toward a book project to be built on the foundations I’ve been trying here in Capillary Actions. I’m new to getting my writing out, so any ideas or connections your have for publishers, journals or other outlets would be great to know about.

Many thanks for reading.

Billy

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10. Reviving the dancing

To revive folk dancing at the Barn, we start with the children at the Goldens Bridge Day Camp.  A small group of my childhood friends, all of us former GBDC campers,  dance Zemer Atik and Mayim for them one morning, invite those who are interested to join us. To our surprise nearly 20 of them jump up and eagerly learn the grapevine step, my daughter is right there in the mix. And so the Goldens Bridge Day Camp Folk Dance Troupe is born.

A couple of times a week I wrangle the group after lunch to rehearse. A few weeks later a full house of parents and Colony members watch the children dance the Troika and the Tzaddik Katamar, videotaping every move.  

But this won’t be a passive audience. After the performance, Sami, an 11-year old, goes straight out to her dad in the third row, grabs the mobile phone out of his hand, and drags both her parents and younger brother onto the floor.  Other troupe members follow suit, and the floor of the Barn is full with intergenerational dancing.

The following Friday nights, some of the families come to dance with us again. It’s beginning to work - our numbers are growing, now drawn from nearby towns, many non-Jews, even some Republicans among them.  If we want to keep our culture alive here, we will need to build a new coalition of sorts.

I also sing with the children in the mornings at the Barn, and now I can feel the strength of the dancing in the space. With the news that the Senate is moving toward passing a climate action bill (note, this was 2022) -- not nearly what we’d fought for, but a victory nonetheless – and the summer’s multiplying climate disasters all over the planet, I decide to talk with the children about the climate emergency. 

I start by teaching them Down By the Riverside - Gonna lay down my sword and shield, ain’t gonna study war no more.  I tell them that when I was a camper at the Day Camp in the 1960’s, we helped to stop the war in Vietnam, infused with that and other songs. That grown-ups can get really mixed-up,  and sometimes when they’re really confused they go to war. That we often need reminders from young people to get back on track. 

I ask them what they know about the climate crisis,  and many eager voices speak up.  We sing a newly devised verse,

Gonna leave them old fossils fuels                                                                                     Deep Down and Underground                                                                                         Gonna quit that oil and gas                                                                                               Leave them buried in the past                                                                                         Gonna quit that gas and oil                                                                                                 Turn down the heat, gonna cool the boil                                                                       Gonna quit that gas and oil. 

I’d been overly cautious to bring anything currently ‘political’ into the day camp, which has in recent years struggled to continue to exist.  Don’t alienate the families from outside the Colony: the legacy of McCarthyism is lodged in me.  But in offering this small, hopeful action of singing together in the Barn, I see the children’s faces encouraged. 

11.Sukkos

Two Octobers ago we were up to the house from the city,  my first autumn visit to the Colony in perhaps 45 years. Our group of families was out scavenging around the land on the clear and still-warm Fall afternoon. We cut cattails from the swamp off Danger Road, plucked ferns from the stream running amidst the boulder field at the foot of the wooded cliff behind the basketball court.  We clipped slender sprigs from the one remaining willow at the side of what was a pond by the Colony’s first road, gathered nuts from beneath the shagbark hickory arching over the lake.

Four thirsty species gathered from the distinct microclimates of the Colony and then woven together into improvised lulavs - the traditional Judaic shamanistic wand of myrtle, willow, palm, and etrog drawn from the corners of Israel during Sukkos, the ancient Festival of Huts and prayers for rain in its season. Waved and shaken now to the six directions while the children and parents dance Zemer Atik. A friend playing the dumbek and me singing the “ancient melody” with a guitar on our acre in front of a shaky open-air wooden structure draped with branches of hemlock, where we will eat and sleep over the next nights. One of just a few sukkahs built on Golden Bridge land over the years. 

What, might wonder the Colony’s decidedly secular founders, is going on here?  Ah, but I take license,  from the knowledge of this place deep in my kishkes, my visceral core, three and four generations later.  That from their rural shtetls of Belarus and Ukraine, Poland and Romania, from nearly a thousand years of actually intimate connection to those lands,  my immigrant ancestors created a vision and entrusted it to us here. That we might somehow come full circle as with this ritual, integrating the religious and the secular. That at a time when the planet is reeling in a deepening environmental crisis driven by the parasitic capitalism that our parents and grandparents fought fiercely to replace, we might draw on these ancient Judaic-biblical-agricultural practices to celebrate this place and teach our children to love it and fight to save it along with other besieged lands.

12.Restoring flow

There were decades when I barely returned to Goldens Bridge at all, seeking my fortunes far afield from what seemed like a community whose time was past, disavowing my Jewish self as a liability within the landscape of American assimilation.  I didn’t want to be swallowed by nostalgia, that orphan of ungrieved loss.  Maybe it took becoming a father nine years ago, or caring for my own parents in their last years, to understand  that this has been home, and to decide to rebuild from here. 

Goldens Bridge is not easy. Along with some of the best of left-wing Yiddishkeit from the immigrant generation, the Colony directly inherited some of the harshness of shtetl life, the trauma of the pogroms, the nasty sectarianism of the Old Left, any of which can still somehow be reactivated among us. One friend remembers trailing his father to community meetings at the Barn in the 1950’s, sneaking out around back for the very thrill of hearing grown-ups screaming like hell at each other. We continue to share communal resources - the Lake, the Barn, the Day Camp, the water system. But any year, there can be a bitter acrimony over something – contested easements, whether to pave the roads, water rights, beach policy, which committee has dominion over which decisions. Multi-generational estrangements are not uncommon. 

There is underway ongoing and intrepid work to restore flow to the cultural river of Goldens Bridge, dammed up as it has been by the passing of the founding generations and by the changing demographics of working-class leftwing Jewish life. And it won’t look like it did.  Those of us who remain are still mourning the losses of the elders and the joyous radical Yiddish culture in its resounding fullness. But we are now an international community, with the strength of many immigrant families from around the world among us, bringing their own cultural vitalities.  In reviving the dancing, adapting and reclaiming song and rituals, finding ways to add our energies into current battles, continuing to steward the lake and the land - here are chances to at least symbolically reverse some of the assimilation, acculturating newcomers into our traditions, incorporating theirs.  One of the newer Colony members returns to visit to her island off Croatia each year – I’m hoping we’ll bring a folk dance from her village into the Barn on Friday nights.  And perhaps some from Vietnam, Albania, Japan.

Cattail, fern, willow and hickory draw from the waters.  Swamp, spring, stream, lake and river begin to feel to me as beings in their own right.  And now I can sense them flowing together into the watershed of the submerged Croton River. The water cycles are disrupted, yes, with continuous droughts and floods. But in learning to follow the water courses and to read the hills, one might tap into the deep history of this place, and so to fortify for the hard fight ahead to sustain life and root cultures here, and on all lands.  We will need to keep listening for the stories of  the ancestors, of the Indigenous ones, and of the waterways.