In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (5 page)

Whenever I speak about the Catskills, I am struck by the strength of people’s desire to relive their experiences in the Mountains. Let me recount one such occasion. I could tell that the audience of forty people at my Borders bookstore reading in Newton, Massachusetts in 1998 was going to be a hot one. People crowded to say hello before I started, including the mother of an emcee from Brickman’s whom I had interviewed. During question time after the talk, the emcee’s mother said, “I have to tell a story,” and took the podium away from me. She recounted how her son told her to say hello to Milton Berle at the hotel, and she comically went up to owner Murray Posner, who was sitting with Berle, and said, “Excuse me, are you Henny Youngman?” Following her, a woman in the audience who had been a Catskills comic ran down a whole comedy routine. It was such a Catskills atmosphere, with everyone playing together and having a good time. I only wish I had had a tape recorder on which to catch it. A younger woman who collects postcards donated twenty-five cards to the Catskills Institute. Many other people commented on their treasured memories; some promised to send photos and interviews. Several people struck up conversations with each other while waiting for me to sign books. They discovered a warm, shared nostalgia; were grateful to have the occasion to talk with other people; and left with each others’ names and numbers written down. They commented to me that it was just like I was talking about in the reading and the book: the Catskills was a magical place to form communities and friendships.

This nostalgia is invigorating. People remember the Catskills with a feeling of longing and memory, paired with a broad consciousness of the historical, cultural, and religious influence of the Jewish Catskills century. It is a desire to reaffirm the communal consciousness that was so much a part of the Jewish experience.

In the midst of this kind of activity, I feel like I have an extended Catskills family. Returning years later, I meet up with people old enough to be my grandparents, people I knew forty and fifty years ago. In 1998 I sat with Irene Asman in her Monticello home, talking about the years she grew up in and then owned the Esther Manor. She welcomed me into her home like a long-lost friend of the family, though I had not seen her in more than forty years. But I belonged there, like I belong in any number of other Catskills locales. Irene, her sister Esther Strasberg, and her brother Carl Goldstein (who died in early 2001) were old friends of the family. Later that year, I chatted with Esther in her New York apartment. My parents would always point out the Esther Manor as we drove past, mentioning that it belonged to their old friends. Both Esther and Irene recalled me as a baby at my family’s Brown’s Hotel Royal. Irene is just one of the old hotel owners and hotel workers I now chat with, people in their eighties and nineties with whom I have a long history. Sol and Dorothy Eagle, 87 and 91 when I saw them in 1997, are other such friends. They lived in our house in Florida in the off season. Sol used his saladman’s skills to do beautiful gargimiere work for my bar mitzvah (the saladman handled all cold food, including fruits and juices that started the meal, all salads, endless varieties of lox and herring, bowls of cole slaw and pickles, cold main dishes, and the famous “livestock,” such as butter and milk). When I visited with him in 1997, he was playing tennis and gardening like a young person. Besides these people who know me from my childhood, I meet new people who have such long roots in the Mountains, like Carrie Komito, running her Aladdin hotel for six decades until she sold it in 1999. It’s almost like having grandparents strung through the Catskills. It’s just another way that my life is connected with these hills.

Sometimes I think the whole Catskills experience is a kind of collective unconscious. Hundreds of thousands of us, maybe millions, sharing in a world of our own, where we were all plugged into a joint reality. Here is a recent example. In 1997 I wrote a short story, “The Make-Believe Hotel” about a girl wandering in the ruins of the River Walk Hotel (a name I made up, though it sounds like several other real names) in South Fallsburg. In her imagination she revives the hotel, including its famous River Walk, lined with Japanese lanterns. She rebuilds the dancing platform at the Neversink River where people can have refreshments and enjoy the band. I had never seen such a riverside arrangement—I must have just assumed there would have been such a place. There had to be!

Well, in October 2000, Julius Merl called me up. His parents owned the Ambassador Hotel on Route 42, a hotel they built up from its 1910 origins as the Gamble Farm, then the Cedar Inn, and in 1921 renamed the Ambassador. That year they built the Japanese Gardens, lined with kerosene-burning Japanese lanterns that cast their spell on the guests as they walked across a bridge to a small island in the Neversink where they were entertained. I was struck by the
déjà vu
of this experience, though it was perhaps not so unique. I feel sure, though, that I can conjure up anything about the Catskills legacy and then find out it really was that way.

The hotels are magical to me. For me, the classic look of a Catskills hotel is the small-sized main house with a stucco finish, windowed gables on the top, a side room on either side of the porch, a canopy over the central entrance, and a broad staircase descending to a walkway. Take a casual glance at the many buildings, including my parents’ hotel, that fit this description, and there is no doubt about it—the hotels are smiling. Stone gateposts frequently stood by the roadside, making up part of the decorative fencing and framing the walkway up to the main house. You can see this today at the still-operating Rainbow Hotel—the walkway is lined with benches that held a multitude of conversations as you strolled up to the central entrance of your personal summer Eden. This was the Yiddish promenade, the boulevard of the Jews, along which you approached the main house, whose unique Catskills design smiled and beckoned you into an oversized home full of warmth and activity. The hotels stood upright and secure, offering the haven of their lobbies for shmoozing, the endless food of their dining rooms for nourishment.

There is no end to what we can find as we search through the generations. Having discovered my parents’ hotel, I continue to encounter people who played a role in its history before and after my parents owned it. In November 1998, Esther Strassberg, co-owner of the Esther Manor Hotel in Monticello, told me that she was a real estate broker in the off season and had brokered the sale of the Royal to my family. Around the same time, I got an e-mail from Phil Neiss in New York, who wrote: “Recently, I was visiting a friend’s house who happened to show me your book,
Catskill Culture
. I was thumbing through it and noticed a recent picture of what was Brown’s Royal Hotel. I was quite surprised, and impressed with the job that the present owners had done to the place. You see, I owned the property for a brief period from 1982 to 1985. I had purchased the facility from the Pasternack family, whom I believed had bought it from your parents in the early 1950s.” He was hoping to have a family getaway, but it fell through. We met and talked about this amazing piece of shared memory.

When I gave a talk at the Monticello Library in August 1999, a man told me afterward that he had stayed at my parents’ hotel when he was six, in 1946. While he didn’t remember details, he promised to call his mother to get some. She reported that their family got a recommendation from a friend in the Bronx who had a Chrysler dealership. What was his name? Moise Lipsit. I said, “That’s my cousin.”

Then in December 2000 I was contacted by Joel Waldman, whose grandfather Max Waldman had sold my parents the Royal. I had already found in county archives the papers showing that Max Waldman sold the hotel in 1946 to my parents, who took out a $16,500 first mortgage and a $4,500 second mortgage. Like me, Joel Waldman used to sleep in one of the porch rooms. I also have in my possession a copy of the August 4, 1952 deed that Joseph Jacobs obtained when he bought the hotel as a mortgage foreclosure for $15,325. Even though the place was crawling with
mishpocheh
, some working and some staying as guests—who could tell the difference?—they were not enough to make it operate.

I have also located relatives in this process. A number of people have asked for help in finding relatives and friends who owned hotels or had other Catskills connections. It has been gratifying to link some people up with family members, but in June 1999 something special happened along this line. A woman e-mailed me, saying that the announcement for our August conference was interesting, though she couldn’t make it. Perhaps, however, I could help her with a family tree problem. It seemed that one of her Snyder family married a Brown who owned a Catskills hotel. I wrote back saying that it sounded like my mother marrying my father, and indeed it was. This woman is my mother’s first cousin, and I never knew she existed. Through her I have located a bunch of other relatives as well, one of whom is even a graduate student at Brown University, where I teach. And we have had a couple of family reunions. Such is the miracle of the Catskills.

What memories we have of the golden years of the Catskills, from the end of World War II into the early 1970s. In Pamela Gray’s unique film,
A Walk on the Moon
, depicting life in a bungalow colony, the loudspeaker blares out, “The knishman is here,” though it doesn’t mention Ruby the Knishman by name. But we know who he is—a vendor renowned throughout the Catskills bungalow colonies. What can it mean that Ruby the Knishman is such an amazing person to remember?
A toizint taamen fun di peddlers
(a thousand tastes from the peddlers), each and every one bringing something special to eat, but none so delicious as the fresh knish from Ruby.

And of all the memories of Ruby that are now circulating, none is so delicious as this e-mail I got in December 1998 from Dara Oshinsky-Deitz:

What a
mechiah
. These are the little miracles of Catskills culture—a woman discovering the importance her father played in the everyday lives of so many ordinary people.

There’s a special miracle in all this for me. I find it striking that virtually all the hotels my parents and I worked in are still standing and being used. Given the number of burned, decayed, fallen in, and demolished hotels, this is beyond the realm of statistical probability. Sometimes I feel I have been called back to these places to document their history and the history of their inhabitants. In 1993, when I started my research, I made a field trip to visit nearly all the resorts at which my parents or I had worked, and in subsequent years located those that I couldn’t find on the first attempt. Of course, the most spectacular for me is my parents’ hotel, Brown’s Royal in White Lake, now the Bradstan. In Accord, Chait’s was Su Casa, since taken over by Elat Chayim, a Jewish Renewal center. The Karmel in Loch Sheldrake is Stage Door Manor, a renowned children’s theater camp. In Swan Lake, the Fieldston Hotel is now Camp B’Nai Yaakov. Also in Swan Lake, Paul’s Hotel is Daytop Village, a drug treatment center, and the Stevensville has reopened as the Swan Lake Resort. In Parkville, the Grand Hotel is another Daytop Village facility. In Kiamesha Lake, the Evans Kiamesha is a housing development and Jewish day school.