WE MET AT GROSSINGER'S Will Come to Garde Arts Center

The Garde Arts Center will host the Connecticut premiere of We Met at Grossinger's, a documentary tracing the rise of the Jewish Catskills — once known as the Borscht Belt — on Thursday, Aug. 13, at 7 p.m. The screening includes a post-film discussion with award-winning director Paula Eiselt (Aftershock, 93Queen), producer Robert Friedman, and Mitchell Grossinger Etess, the last general manager of the famous Grossinger's Resort in the Catskill Mountains and a fourth-generation member of the family behind it.

The 104-minute film revives Grossinger's Resort and Hotel, the real-life inspiration for the setting of Dirty Dancing and, for decades, the best-known destination among the more than 500 hotels, boarding houses, and bungalows that made up the Catskills' Jewish resort culture. At a time when antisemitism kept Jewish families out of many American clubs and resorts, Grossinger's became a retreat where guests could be themselves — and it drew a striking cross-section of American life, from Mel Brooks and Jerry Seinfeld to Jackie Robinson and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Etess, who took over as the resort's general manager at age 26 and held the post until Grossinger's closed in 1986, is one of the film's central interview subjects, alongside his mother and sister. The retired CEO of Mohegan Gaming and Entertainment now resides in Old Lyme. Etess told the Garde that the documentary grew far beyond what he expected. What began as a project about his grandmother — a woman with a sixth-grade education who rose from a New York garment-district sweatshop to a featured guest on This Is Your Life — became, in his words, a film about "the whole impact of antisemitism and the refuge of the Catskills."

That family history includes his mother, who became the first woman to serve as president of both the New York State Hotel Association and the American Hotel Association, opening doors for women in hospitality leadership. It also includes the sheer scale of the resort itself: an 800-acre property with 600 guest rooms, 27 holes of golf, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, and one of the first snowmaking machines ever built — invented, Etess noted, in Connecticut.

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