socialist camp for children

NY Times, August 19, 2001

CITY LORE
The Little Red Summer Camp: From the Village to the Woods

By IVY MEEROPOL (granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)

Alan E. Solomon for The New York Times

Tucked away in the woods of southern Massachusetts, Camp Kinderland
has all the trappings of a summer camp: bunks, a lake, a sports
field. But the bunks have names like Joe Hill and Pablo Neruda, and
the murals in the dining hall depict great moments in labor history.

Kinderland was founded in 1923 by secular Jews active in the New York
City trade union movement, most of them Communists or socialists. As
their numbers dwindled, Kinderland fell on hard times.

In 1977, when I was 8 and my brother was 7, my father, Michael
Meeropol, traded folk singing for our first summer's camp fee. The
buildings were dilapidated, the tone was strident and the camp was
struggling to survive. Our small but scrappy group played kickball
and sang civil rights songs. We didn't know that the 80's were just a
sharp right around the corner as we shouted "Solidarity Forever" and
waved a Cuban flag in the Peace Olympics.

Returning to camp, in Tolland, Mass., after 18 years, I was afraid to
find Kinderland a dated relic, with only the reluctant children of
disillusioned leftists to fill its bunks. But Kinderland is booming.
There are new bunks and a new dining hall, and the Paul Robeson
Playhouse has doubled in size as campers arrive in greater numbers
each year. Two hundred attended this summer, and there was a waiting
list.

By the third day of the season, many campers look as if they've been
contentedly strolling these grounds their entire lives. Some of them
have. One of many Manhattanites, Emma Bernstein, a 16-year-old Upper
West Sider with blue hair who is in her eighth summer, says: "Camp
Kinderland is like a utopia. All of the best people in the world are
here." Another 16-year-old, Jesse Smith Campoamor, adds: "I live in
Manhattan, and there's this facade outside of camp that everyone has
to carry, this fake self because they're scared, they don't trust
anybody. But when we come to camp we take that mask off and it's raw,
it's real, the realest thing possible."

Jesse is the son of a camper and the grandson of a couple who met at
the camp 50 years ago. Many Kinderland campers are legacies, but a
growing number of people seem to be finding it on their own.

"I think a lot of parents send their kids to Kinderland now because
they're appalled by the level of control that the media has on their
kids," said Alice Shechter, the director since 1988.

Today's campers are more likely to come from the West Village than
the Bronx (where Kinderland buses picked up campers at the "coops,"
the United Workers Houses). Hannah Quinn heard about the camp seven
years ago when Ms. Shechter sang at her school, Public School 3 in
the West Village.

"P.S. 3 has become an enormous feeder," Ms. Schecter said. "Over the
years probably 100 kids have come from there." Another is the Little
Red School House in the Village, where my uncle Robert went.

Kinderland, Yiddish for "children's world," represents a melding of
Yiddish culture and left-wing politics. "From the very beginning,
camp reflected the idea of bringing radical and ethnic politics
together and in many regards changed what Jewishness is today," said
Paul Mischler, who researched the camp's history for his 1999 book
"Raising Reds."

Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/nyregion/thecity/19LORE.html

--
Louis Proyect,
lnp3@panix.com
on 08/19/2001

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