Arise, Ye Prisoners of Summer Camp. Part 2

Wake up! Market time! Time to get to market!

It’s not the kind of thing one expects to hear shouted—or rather, bellowed—by one’s bunk counselor. But this was Camp Habonim Naaleh, so nothing really fazed us by midsummer, even if the counselor in question underscored his pronouncement by repeatedly whacking a small tin pot with a giant tin ladle. I had a strong streak of prudery in me at that age, and hadn’t yet developed a useful lexicon of four-letter words, and so I was entirely unprepared, as my bunkmates and I shuffled into the chilly pre-dawn, to discover that a shtetl, half Hooverville and half Thunderdome, had sprouted in the middle of camp.

There were stalls (of a sort) jury-rigged from tables, poles and billowing sheets, where shopgirls in paisley babushkas sold raisins and American cheese in exchange for the local currency—raisins. The camp goats wandered in a state of goaty confusion. The few guy counselors in evidence, capped and vested, carried tools and battered kitchenware, shouting what Yiddish they remembered and hocking their wares. It was all pretty amusing–for a while; but gradually we got the sense that no one knew quite what to do with our Fiddler LARP. We kids kind of wandered around, waiting for something to happen.

 Look—to the East!   The Cossacks– The Cossacks are coming!

.

We looked. And there they were, the scrawniest Cossacks ever, terrifying in their hastily assembled battle schmattes, cresting the hill and laying about themselves with whiffle-ball bats and tennis rackets. I was horrified and delighted: I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but mob violence was clearly a positive development. The shopgirls gathered up their skirts and raisins and fled in mock terror; the goats watched with equanimity as the shtetl was laid low. But just as it grew clear that our cause was lost, that was when Head Counselor Gary, like Gandalf at Helm’s Deep, appeared from nowhere and cried, The Cossacks have won—we have to flee! To the boats!

And so, led heroically into retreat, we kids of Camp Naaleh bade farewell to Anatevka and found ourselves trudging through fields on an unfamiliar road, wondering about breakfast and eating whatever raisins we had managed to pocket before the attack. The sun rose higher in the sky, and I thought of the ones left behind, the shopgirls who hadn’t escaped and who, even now, were probably enjoying a variety of cold drinks in the dining room. Time passed, and word spread that we were lost, and that Head Counselor Gary was leading us to Pennsylvania, where they did not look kindly on refugees.

Then the road turned and dipped, and we could see a lake shimmering through the goldenrod. There, as promised, were the boats—two or three rowboats with counselors waiting to ferry us to the other side.

..

One of the girls’ counselors, Sharon, was sitting on a tiny island in the middle of the lake, reading a book and wearing some kind of green sheet. When she saw us at the shore, however, she stood to attention: one hand held the book (I like to imagine it was Zinn’s People’s History of the US) to her side, the other thrust a flashlight proudly at the sky, her sheet draping classically to the ground.

.