Summer Camp Confidential

By SUE EDELMAN

SLEEPAWAY
Writings on Summer Camp
Edited by Eric Simonoff
314 pages. Riverhead Trade. $14.

Every year around the end of June, just as the weather is getting sticky hot and kids run the streets like lunatics, celebrating their emancipation from school, I get this strange feeling that I’m supposed to be somewhere else. I think: Time to pack up my trunk and Dad’s old Army duffle and head off to summer camp for two months of non-stop sports, singing, camaraderie, and mischief. Problem is, it’s been 22 summers since I’ve had the luxury of making my annual pilgrimage to Camp Timber Tops in the Pocono Mountains of northeast Pennsylvania, where, as a teenager and young adult, I spent eight glorious summers as a camper and a counselor.

As I get that unappeasable yearning in my belly yet again this year, I take some comfort in reading Eric Simonoff’s new compilation, Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp. Simonoff, himself a devotee of the cult of all things camp, has assembled an impressive roster of well-known and award-winning contributors—Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, Diana Trilling, ZZ Packer and more than a dozen others, including several Jewish writers—who offer personal memoirs, essays, fiction, poetry, and even cartoons, all on the subject of the summer camp experience. The book is a nostalgic, and sometimes harsh, look at camp, with stories that range from funny to tragic. They share many common themes, the most salient of which is that at camp, where there is so much emphasis on fitting in, what you learn about yourself is not so much who you are, but who you aren’t.

For many Jewish kids, going to overnight camp is a summer staple. In my day, parents packed up their station wagons and drove their kids to New Hampshire or Upstate New York or the Berkshires to officially Jewish camps like Ramah and Young Judaea. Or, in the alternative, kids went to “Jewish-lite” camps like my own Camp Timber Tops, owned and run by Jews, where the food was kosher-style, but not kosher, most of the kids were Jewish, but not all, and the only truly Jewish thing was the brief Friday night Shabbat services, which, except for the few blessings that began each one, were really just another excuse to have a sing-along campfire, just with a special theme like “friendship” or “trust.”

Sleepaway gives us a number of glimpses into the camp experience from a Jewish perspective, including contributions from former JBooks editor Josh Lambert and Brooklyn-based writer Ellen Umansky. The camp musings of other Jewish authors such as James Atlas, Mark Oppenheimer (whose lefty parents sent him to both a Quaker and a Communist camp), Lev Grossman, Cynthia Kaplan, and Diana Trilling are also represented.

Veteran campers and counselors will find in the pages of Sleepaway many long-lost friends from their sleepaway days, friends like lanyard and s’mores, color war and general swim, flag raisings and campfire sing-alongs. While there are tales of fairly traditional camps, there are also memories of fringier camps dedicated to special interests like political causes, music and intellectual advancement.

Sleepaway explores camp traditions and rituals as diverse as the camps themselves, and which seem to stick with campers into adulthood with a sense of both absurdity and reverence. From Trilling’s "The Girls of Camp Lenore" come rituals like morning Assembly and afternoon Music Hour at Mrs. Spectorsky’s camp for girls where aesthetics are favored over athletics. At the camps of Mark Oppenheimer’s youth, the writer discovers that the camp’s daily Meeting is actually a Quaker tradition. Later, he laments the surreal “Kinderland Tie” that ends every sporting match at his Communist camp, regardless of the final score, all in the name of equality.

In the co-ed Jewish camp of Lambert’s "The Brief Summer of Amir and Ariella—An Allegory," the male counselors are warned in staff training about the teenage girls who will, at the conclusion of the weekly Friday night Shabbat services on the beach, “press their little tits into your stomach, rub up against you, try to give you a hard-on.” Hooking up may not be on the teens’ daily schedule at Camp Chalutzim, but they’re doing it alright!

Meanwhile, at Cynthia Kaplan’s childhood camp, there were no socials for the "Queechy Girls," since they were “renown for their winning combination of athletic ability, teamwork, and pep, and pitting them against each other for the attentions of pimply paced, perpetually engorged… boys from, say, Camp Tonkahanni, might undermine the confidence of even the most spirited, talented Queechy girl, not to mention threaten many deep friendships.” Meanwhile, the secret of the odd-girl-out of Camp Queechy (no one can figure out why she comes back to camp, year after year, despite the fact that she is universally despised) is finally discovered, changing everything forever.

Friendships are the meatiest part of the camp experience for many campers, and we feel badly for those who lack them. Social castes at camp are quite different from those at school. (I know this first-hand from my experience as a socially peripheral, fairly geeky student during the year, but an outgoing leader at summer camp.) The challenges at camp—to be popular, to be “successful,” to fit in—are measured in odd currency, as if the cool quotient is calculated differently at those mountainous altitudes. At camp, whether or not you’re cool depends on how many lines you have in the camp play, how far you can hit a softball or whether or not you have a boyfriend or girlfriend. And if you don’t have “the camp spirit,” whatever form that spirit takes at any given camp (exuberant singing, athletic zeal, intellectual superiority or a commitment to lefty politics) you’re socially out of luck. If you don’t embrace the camp group think, you could end up like Lizzie in Ellen Umansky’s "How to Make It to the Promised Land," a misfit at Camp Shalom with one sort-of friend who claims to be from another planet. No one wants to be that kid.

At the music camp of Lev Grossman’s "Cello, Goodbye," the sense of social equality among the campers was “purely an illusion, and a temporary one… [The camp] was a test, designed to establish whether or not we had a true vocation: Some of us were talented amateurs, and some of us were future professionals…The former had yet to be weeded from the latter.” For Grossman, a summer at an elite music camp taught him which side of that equation he fell on, and sadly, the title predicts the bad news. Grossman is not alone in his camp “failure,” and the good news is that he, like most people, does recover.

I still remember all that was great about summer camp—snuggly gray hooded sweatshirts, drinking ice-cold Cherokee Red from a can, the joys of hitting a homerun or successfully short-sheeting the counselor’s bed—and I can still remember every last word of every last song we sang, until our voices were raspy and two octaves lower. For those, like me, for whom camp provides the most treasured of childhood memories, Sleepaway will bring it all back, then turn it upside down by revealing the darker side of the camp coin. I’ve still got that feeling I should be heading for the hills, but with Sleepaway on my nightstand, I’m that much closer to sweet dreams of summer.