(Jewish Group) The Jewish travel guide that inspired the Green Book
Fearing that her land would be seized as World War I approached, Austrian-born Pessah “Pearl” Ravitz fled to New York City to start a new life. She had imagined New York as a place of promise, ripe with opportunity for a resourceful woman such as herself. The city was quick to disappoint. Ravitz was met with discrimination because of her Jewish identity, and life in the metropolis was stifling. In the summer, sweltering temperatures exacerbated the city’s stench.
“They came to this country looking for the streets paved with gold, but what they got was a lot of antisemitism,” said Alan Kook, her great-great-grandson.
Ravitz managed to buy land not far away in Pennsylvania and began to re-create the life she had enjoyed in Austria, where she had owned a successful farm and supplemented her income in the winter by taking in traveling circus troupes as boarders, according to Kook. In Pennsylvania, too, she put up boarders in the summer, welcoming friends and friends of friends looking for relief from the city heat. She would cook and entertain, styling the farm as a mountain getaway.
Ravitz was one of thousands of Jewish farmers who thrived with this hybrid farm-inn model in early 20th-century America. More than 1 million Jews had immigrated to the United States by 1924, with many clustering around New York City. Working-class Jews living in cramped tenement houses were keen to escape to the countryside in the summer, but many hotels explicitly forbade Jewish guests. This is how people like Ravitz — and many others, scattered around the Catskills, Connecticut and New Jersey — came to run thriving boarding businesses. Some would eventually give up farming to expand their hotels.
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