In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (39 page)

This song was performed live by the waiters in front of the guests, and went on for many verses. The singer would talk over the musical backdrop, complaining about the trials and tribulations of being a waiter. “Everyone wants the end piece of roast beef. But there are only two end pieces. What is a waiter to do?”

When I was young I would sing on talent night. One disastrous evening my selection was “Maria,” from
West Side Story
. Somewhere along the way I got the lyrics confused and I found myself stuck singing “I’ll never stop saying ‘Maria.’” When it became clear that I couldn’t figure out how to get past this point, the audience burst into laughter, and the band brought the song to a merciful conclusion. Later I would stick to playing the saxophone—no lyrics to worry about. Eventually Howie and I would play saxophone–piano duets, most notably Dave Brubeck’s rhythmically complex “Take Five.”

But talent night itself changed as the clientele changed. When the hotel was filled with families with children, talent night was a wild and unpredictable affair, with elaborate skits, stage-struck tykes, and aging wannabes grabbing a moment in the spotlight. As the supply of precocious children playing accordion or performing tap dances dried up, talent night become more a show of staff members, along with fewer and fewer aging divas. Bingo night eventually displaced it.

The great divide came at the end of the sixties, when youth music turned firmly to rock and roll at the same time that the guests became much older. As a young teen, I was drawn to the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Simon and Garfunkel. Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme just didn’t cut it anymore. There was no longer any middle ground, no Ed Sullivan mainstream to claim any allegiance on the part of the staff in their teens and early twenties.

Out with Yiddishkeit, in with Woodstock. We did manage to get to the Woodstock festival, which took place not more than fifteen miles from the Delmar. My cousin Karen and her husband Alan just happened to be at the hotel. They were much older, perhaps in their late twenties at the time. We had to wait until Howie was done playing after the show, and at 11:15
P.M
. Karen, Alan, Howie, and I hopped in the car and took off for Woodstock. Being locals, we knew the back way. The main roads had long since been closed, but we were able to park no more than a mile or so away. The scene of more than 300,000 young men and women camping out in the mud, listening to the greatest bands of the day was remarkable, even at one in the morning. We wedged ourselves into a little spot and spread out a blanket to keep the worst of the mud at bay. Creedence Clearwater Revival played a nice set from about 1:30 to 3:00
A.M
. We decided not to wait for Janis Joplin, who was scheduled to come on at 4:00 or 5:00
A.M
. We had to get back to the hotel, get whatever sleep we could, and be ready to set up for breakfast at 7:30
A.M
. But we made it to Woodstock!

T
HE
K
ITCHEN AND THE
D
INING
R
OOM

Jewish food was central to the hotel experience. At first the aging clientele clung to the traditional foods. But eventually the salty and greasy dishes no longer suited the older guests. Broiled flounder, not Big Macs, spelled the end of potato latkes.

The times I remember most fondly at the hotel were the quiet times, preparing for the season. As a little boy, in the bakery with my mom, my job was to put the sprinkles on the cookies before they went in the oven. I imagine all kids like to put sprinkles on cookies, but I got to decorate hundreds and hundreds. I remember finally being old enough to be in charge of the maraschino cherries. I felt very grown up.

And the blintz blitzes. We would prepare the blintzes before the season and freeze them. Through some interpretation of the “no cooking on Sabbath” rule, warming up blintzes on a stove that had already been lit before sundown on Friday didn’t exactly count as cooking. Thus frying blintzes was OK, but frying an egg was not. This didn’t make the slightest sense to me, but I could accept the fact that the hotel was advertised as following kosher rules, so we had to stay within the limits of what was accepted. In any event, we would set up a blintz assembly line on the kitchen table. Mom would make a vat of batter, and would have five or six skillets going at once. My brother (and sometimes my father) and I would take it from there: stuff the blintzes, roll them up, and line them on an industrial-size baking sheet. We would need about 125 servings of cheese and 25 potato (my preference) for each Saturday in the summer, and we would knock off two or three Saturdays’ worth in one of our sessions. Of course the participants were first in line for spoils of the blintz blitzes. Now and then Howie and I would declare a blintz irreparably broken, and we would get to munch on it then and there.

Aging, not Americanization, displaced many of the most traditional staples on the menu. Prunes and cottage cheese replaced lox and eggs at breakfast, broiled flounder was awarded the slot previously held by baked whitefish at lunch, and boiled chicken and flanken came to rival brisket of beef as a choice for dinner. We had to stop serving potato latkes because our guests could no longer eat fried foods.

My mother and I quarreled about ending our lox-on-demand policy. I said “That’s what people come here for!” But she was right—salt-free diets were becoming increasingly common, and rotating lox and herring every day or two made perfect sense. One alumnus of the Delmar dining room staff opened his own restaurant, but it was yuppie food, not shtetl cuisine, that was his specialty (although I am told that noodle kugel and a lox and eggs combination called “The Catskill Scrambler” have made it onto the menu).

I managed to have my friends hired as waiters and busboys. This made work in the dining room much more tolerable. The camaraderie of the dining room staff was among the most enduring pleasures of the hotel. We would regale each other with the latest outrageous request a guest had made and exchange tips on how to persuade people to accept the less popular main dishes. We would nickname the guests (whom we got to know quite well, since they typically stayed at least two weeks, and not infrequently six or eight weeks). When the routine got to us, we would escape by doing charades with food themes. Our lame efforts to imitate smoked whitefish or brisket of beef with
tsimes
would help pass the time while we cleaned up after dinner.

We even managed to establish a day-off policy. Until that time, being a waiter meant working three meals a day, seven days a week from late June until Labor Day. It could become quite a grind. Preparation for breakfast started at 7:30
A.M
. and setting up after dinner usually wasn’t done until 9
P.M
. Of course there were breaks between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner, but the next meal was never more than a few waking hours away.

I still like a good bagel, but none of this blueberry bagel nonsense. Real bagels are traditional plain bagels, or poppyseed, or maybe pumpernickel. But when we moved to Philadelphia we were more worried about finding a flaky croissant than finding a good bagel. I enjoy a good corned-beef sandwich, but I’m more likely to seek out a pad Thai than kugel. I do miss a number of the dishes from the hotel, and I plan to get my mother’s recipes one day. But this is not so easy. Many were not written down, and the rest require downscaling from a batch designed for 150 people to a batch intended for a family of 4.

I had borscht nearly every day for lunch for four or five years straight. When my Catskills roots come up in conversation, I volunteer “Yes, I have borscht in my veins.” But the bottled borscht in the store is not the same, and making my own is out of the question. I was never especially fond of gefilte fish, but now it represents the Catskills for me and I try to buy some during Jewish holidays. Unfortunately, my Italian American wife, Sharon, prefers not to be in the house when I’m eating it.

T
RAVEL

The idea of going to a Jewish hotel, eating Jewish food, and watching Jewish entertainment was never something I even considered. Jews no longer faced restrictions in pursuing the vacation of their choice. Not that we would necessarily blend in right away. Far from it. We knew that “they” lived in a separate world, and we were not especially keen to pass for Gentiles. I remember, as a child traveling with my family, finding ourselves in a proper Virginia restaurant on our way to visit the Luray Caverns one Christmas vacation. A solemn version of the Christmas carol “Greensleeves” was playing in the background, while a fire filled the huge stone fireplace trimmed with pine wreaths. I suddenly recognized the tune from Alan Sherman’s riotous version of it on his satiric/comic album. My dad and I whispered our Jewish version of “Greensleeves” until my mom told us to be quiet. We sensed that we were not among our people, and that our sacrilegious version of the song might land us in a serious spot.

A college education fed the thirst for world travel. Since finishing graduate school, Sharon and I have traveled to Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and we have a long list of places we would like to visit someday. Go to a resort? Preposterous. But not so preposterous anymore, now that we have young children. But of course there are few resorts left in the Catskills.

On one trip, Sharon and I saw a performance of Chinese acrobats in Shanghai, while on a tour the year before the Tiananmen Square massacre. There was a contortionist who balanced a wine glass on his nose, on top of which a tray was placed. He quickly added more glasses and more trays until there was an amazing tower of glassware, still balanced on his nose. At this point, he was handed a clarinet, and he belted out an enthusiastic version of “
Hava Nagila
.” I remember laughing hysterically, but I could hear my Aunt Sarah whispering in my ear, “So, you have to travel six thousand miles to hear ‘
Hava Nagila
.’ You could have heard it for free in the casino, whenever you wanted. But then you weren’t interested.”

So going to a Catskills hotel was pretty much out of the question. And running one made no sense to me, as a professional with what I considered to be loftier goals. And why run a hotel if there are no guests? If I would not consider a Catskills vacation, which of my peers would? So we let the Catskills die of neglect. But I wish some of it remained, because it was a special place and a special time. And it was full of life, especially when whole families came up for much of the summer.

So, in my view, it was not my generation, the Woodstock generation, that killed the Catskills, although we certainly share the responsibility. The generation that came of age in the late fifties and early sixties had long since departed. The gulf between my world and that of the Delmar’s aging guests widened steadily. My friends were far more preoccupied with Watergate than with the Holocaust. We were all bar mitzvahed, all recited our
haftorahs
more than adequately, but being a success meant succeeding on American terms, not in some Jewish corner of America.

Law, medicine, and academics were the most obvious paths ahead. I didn’t know anyone who seriously considered emigrating to Israel, becoming a rabbi, or running a hotel. My dear friend Eileen Pollack wrote a wonderful novel about the Catskills,
Paradise New York
, which drew on her experiences at her family’s hotel (Pollack’s) and, I like to think, a few Delmar stories she heard on long drives to debate tournaments as well. Yet I was astonished that the protagonist in
Paradise
decides to take over her grandparents’ hotel. So much of her story reflects a penetrating insight into the reality of Catskills life, but this twist is surely just a plot device. We felt no special need to apply to Brandeis because we expected a fair enough shot at Ivy League and other top colleges. If we were worried about having Jewish classmates, we would find no shortage at Columbia or even Yale and Princeton.

W
ITHOUT A
T
RACE

Sharon and I were married at the hotel, in 1983, on a sunny October afternoon with the autumn foliage nearing its peak. All went well—the right bride, the right place. I wasn’t sure how my friends from college would react to the hotel, but a few said it was much nicer than I had described. And I think my parents were pleased to have it as the setting for this life milestone. At the last minute, we decided that it was warm enough to hold the ceremony outside. So we rolled up our sleeves and carried the folding chairs from the casino to the front lawn of the hotel. A caterer would not have been as flexible.

My parents were ambivalent about whether the hotel should feature in their sons’ lives. They felt the Delmar was a good thing because it enabled their sons to earn money for college. But college was always the future, and how long could they realistically expect their college-educated sons to run the place? And opportunities for professional positions were few in the Catskills. The last conversation we had about taking over the hotel occurred when I was finishing up my Ph.D. “When you are teaching in a university, you will have your summers off. Would you want to think about running the hotel during the summer, as a backup?” “Dad!” was all I could manage in reply. We had always scorned those absentee hotel owners who would scurry up to the Mountains just before the season. Surely he wouldn’t want his son to adopt this halfhearted approach. But I suppose it is natural to want to pass along your life’s work to your children. A few short years later the hotel was sold to Italian owners, and a year later it was recycled into a drug-rehabilitation center (as had happened to a number of other hotels before it).