'Anyone who could write such a letter doesn't deserve our business.' She took it back and stuffed it in its envelope with no particularĪrchival care. 'You don't go where you're not wanted,' my mother said. We were safe here, remember? The letter was ignorant, and very bad manners. Not that she wanted me to worry, because this was America, not Germany, My mother explained: There were people, unfortunately-for reasons it was hard to explain or understand-who weren't Nazis but didn't like Jews. Soundproof, and who among our Gentile acquaintances would bring us food under penalty of death. I had been wed to the subject since reading, without her permission, The Diary of a Young Girl-specifically obsessed by where we, who had no attic, could hide that would be

I hadn't known up to that moment that I had a surname that was recognizably Jewish, or that people named Marx would be unwelcome somewhere in the United States because of it. Very truly yours, (Mrs.) Ingrid Berry, Reservations Manager.' Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. The Inn at Lake Devine isĪ family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922.

We do have a few openings during the period you requested. Our two-bedroom cabins rent at the weekly rate of sixty-five (U.S.) dollars. Croquet on the lawn, the Vermont vacation guide had said rowboats, sundown concerts on Saturday nights a lifeguard, a dock, a raft, a slide. Typed on textured white stationery below a green pointillist etching of a lakeside hotel. The others answered with printed rate cards and cordial notes. She sent the same letter to a dozen cottage colonies and inns inquiring about rates and availability. Listed some twenty accommodations on Lake Devine. She found a lake on the map that was neither too big nor too small, and not too far north. That year she wrote to Vermont, which someone had told her was heaven. We'd been to Cape Cod and Cape Ann, to Old Orchard, Salisbury, and Hamptonīeaches, to Winnipesaukee and the Finger Lakes. We were nothing to them, a name on an envelope, when it began in 1962 as a response to a blind inquiry my mother had sent out in multiples. It was not complicated, and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: They had a hotel they didn't want Jews we were Jews.

The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman