What do Walter Mathau (the actor) and Jax (the songwriter with 14 million followers on TikTok) have in common? And what do they have in common with Joseph Heller (the author of “Catch-22”) and Gene Simmons (the frontman of Kiss)?
They all attended the oldest Jewish sleepaway camp in the country, Surprise Lake Camp. And they aren’t the only notable alumni: Larry King, Neil Diamond, Neil Simon and Jerry Stiller also once spent their summers at the New York camp.
Today, Surprise Lake Camp is a modern Jewish summer camp with a gaga pit, zipline and promotional video shot with a drone. But when the camp was founded in 1902 by a Lower East Side social welfare agency, it was conceived as a chance for the boys from the neighborhood to experience the great outdoors and get relief from the overcrowded tenements. (Girls, famously, did not need relief from these conditions; a girls’ camp wasn’t established until 1952.) From the 1920s to 1940s, there was even a winter camp with the goal of providing nourishment to underweight boys from the tenements.
One of the very first campers was a tenement kid named Isidore Itzkowitz, an orphan being raised by his grandmother. After finding a knack for storytelling around the campfire, he went on to become a beloved star of radio, Vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood, and one of SLC’s most important benefactors. You might know him by the name of Eddie Cantor.
In his autobiography, Cantor wrote about how shocking it was to leave the thick, herring-scented congestion of the Lower East Side for the wide open spaces of Surprise Lake Camp. “Grandma Esther, thankful to be rid of me for two weeks and have me out of harm’s way, paid [one dollar and a half], and I went for my virgin trip to the country,” he wrote. “Cold Springs was a strange place. There wasn’t a horsecart or a delicatessen store in it… My first breathless impression of wonder was mingled with anger. Why had the city folk held out on me and not told me of this ‘bunk’ sooner?”
Surprise Lake Camp was a highlight of Cantor’s childhood, and in the early 1920s, after achieving fame, he began contributing to the camp. He made invaluable contributions during the Great Depression and continued to support the camp throughout his entire life. Today, Shabbat services are still held in the Eddie Cantor Theater.
Surprise Lake Camp seemed to help Cantor unlock his passion and talent, but for some of the camp’s other famous alumni, like Jerry Stiller, Joseph Heller and Gene Simmons, the link isn’t so straightforward.
Stiller, who attended sometime in the 1930s or early 1940s, listened to Eddie Cantor on the radio with his father as a kid. It stands to reason that he would have been excited to leave his poor Jewish neighborhood for the camp with Eddie Cantor’s stamp of approval. But Stiller makes no mention of the connection when he writes about attending Surprise Lake Camp — only a tongue-in-cheek compliment.
“Surprise Lake was warm and supervised and full of wonderful food. Much too nice for me. I couldn’t handle it,” Stiller wrote in his memoir, comparing Surprise Lake Camp to the cold, non-Jewish Camp Carey that he also attended.
Joseph Heller also described his summer camp experience in his memoir. “The camp operated as a charity for underprivileged city children, and I qualified,” he wrote. “This summer camp, supposedly a treat, was experienced by me as a lonely and puzzling ordeal pockmarked by ceaseless physical inconvenience.” He goes on to describe the bugs, the cold and slimy lake, and the discomfort of sleeping in a bed that wasn’t his own. “Was I glad to get back!”
Later, when the camp was becoming more of a modern Jewish summer camp, an Israeli American kid named Chaim Witz — aka Gene Simmons — went to Surprise Lake Camp once his mother started making more money. “I stayed there for three weeks, which seemed like an eternity, mainly because there was no television,” he wrote in “KISS and Make-up.”
“The last thing I wanted to do was hike, and the second to last thing was play sports,” Simmons added. But at the camp talent show, he had a moment to shine. “Right at my moment in the show, the rest of the stage went black, and I was in the spotlight by myself. I opened my mouth to take a deep breath, and I swallowed a giant moth that died violently, squirming all the way down my throat.”
In the late 1950s, a young Neil Diamond had a better musical experience at Surprise Lake Camp.
“I fell in love with folk music at Surprise Lake Camp,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2015. “It was the songs of Woody Guthrie and the Weavers.” In the late 1950s, Pete Seeger performed at the camp. “Some of the kids had actually written a song and they played it for him,” Diamond told Rolling Stone in 1976. “I kinda sat in the back and watched, and I became aware of the possibility of actually writing a song. And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs.”
The Surprise Lake Camp to celebrity pipeline has mostly quieted, with one exception: Jaclyn Miskanic, better known as Jax, a TikTok famous songwriter whose mother, former camper and staff member Jill Miskanic, wrote a gushing article for the camp newsletter in 2015 when Jax made it to the Hollywood round of “American Idol.”
“I’m kvelling,” she wrote, continuing, “Jax’s very first stage was at the Eddie Cantor Theater. She will always have a place in her heart’s memory for singing with Rick Recht, Paul Suchow, and of course, Pete Seeger…This is where she learned to sing her heart out.”
Only time will tell what future stars are currently swallowing bugs at a camp song session this very moment.
New Year, More Kveller. A few dollars keeps Kveller joyfully, honestly free.
