In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (66 page)

And then we are once again at Green Gardens Lodge, parking in crunchy gravel amidst many large Fords, Chryslers, Cadillacs, one Yellow Taxi cab, and also a Mercedes. They have millionaires here, and taxi drivers.

“How can a Jew drive a Mercedes?” Miriam has asked me, more than once. She has not forgotten the German military-industrial complex, and will not forgive.

A ring of forty spruce little cottages, freshly painted, encircling a razored lawn and a few shade trees. There are common rooms and outbuildings, a hotel turned condominium, patches of flowers and shrubs, a tennis court, and a pool with a fence that is locked until after lunch. This is the bungalow colony, my in-laws’ summer world.

I turned off the motor, cracked open the car door. It was nearly as hot as New York City. But the hot air was clean, cleansed in the mountain night, and by this time on a Friday, nearly noon, the air was redolent: chicken soup boiling in country kitchens. And Jacob had seen us; he approached over the lawn ready to hoist luggage into his spare, bony, surprisingly strong arms. As far as I can tell, he never changes, never ages.

My little warm ones slid from the car and ran, looking ahead, not back. They belonged here—and still do—among the grannies and uncles and grandpas and aunts, the visiting grandchildren, the Polish and Yiddish conversations, the piped music, the card parties. They ran. The hammock to swing in, the flowers to water, the screen door to bang, lunch all prepared and a huge box of homemade cookies: they ran toward these things.

We ate, I unpacked, the children ran. Ladies in housedresses gathered and greeted, questioned, scolded—barefoot children in an era of deer ticks. I hunted for little shoes and socks in the grass. I took the children to the pool, and Jacob came to watch. I bathed the children after their swim. Miriam fixed ice cream cones. All was in her knowing embrace.

Later, Miriam’s Sabbath dinner on the screened porch, and, with the fading sun, the lighting of her Sabbath candles.

My husband found his way there that night. We all slept in the two small rooms of Miriam’s bungalow, under fresh line-dried linens warmed by Catskill sun and ironed to silken smoothness under Miriam’s practiced hand.

Twenty years ago, Miriam, Jacob, and their circle, acquaintances, family, and friends, bought this place. A few years later I, fresh from the midwest, was feted here with my fiancé. Ten years ago I brought my first baby, to rock in the hammock my husband installed between two shade trees and to feast on the admiration and surreptitious sweets a colony of grandparents could provide in full measure.

Then I brought my two children, escaping a cramped city apartment and frenzied work week to stretch out in Miriam’s hospitality amidst the pleasant green. Later we moved to the suburbs, and I left my office job: escape was less urgent. I don’t come as often these days. Still, a few times each summer I arrive with my children, three children now, neglecting my own house and garden for two days or three or five. The three children fan out in all directions: this is their place, deeply, completely, and always. They love it. How lucky they are to be here.

Here Miriam cooks her country dishes. If we arrive at lunchtime, lunch is ready. Eggs and onions, perhaps. Before we arrive, Miriam slices five or six onions. She peppers them, softens them over a low flame, adds plenty of oil, and fries the onions to a caramel sweetness. Then she scrambles the onions with five giant eggs, adds a pinch or two of salt, heaps it all on a warm platter, and brings it proudly to the table.

The table is
gemakht
, ready, with barely a centimeter to spare. Here is a plate of sliced melon, blueberries, strawberries, and a bowl of sugar for the berries. There may be ripe tomatoes cut into chunks with raw Spanish onion, oil, and wine vinegar. Perhaps a herring in cream sauce, or a tin of smoked sardines. If there is
mizerya
, finely sliced cucumbers dressed in sour cream beaten with lemon juice, salt, and sugar, there will be little dishes and spoons to nurse the tangy sauce. There are fresh little challah rolls, or heavy slices of corn rye bread festooned with caraway seeds. Cream cheese with scallions.

In my honor, the old coffee percolator spits and taps stovetop. Miriam and Jacob drink instant coffee, a cup each at dawn. I drink high octane coffee all day.

These are jolly grand country lunches on the breezy screened porch crowded around the small porch table.

Neighbors pass by. “Good appetite!” they call, in accented English.

“Send the children over later, I have something for them!” orders
Tante
Sonia at the screen door. Probably chocolate and gum and Polish wafers and lollipops from Aunt Sonia’s bottomless supply.

“Sonia! Come in, eat something!” urges Miriam. “Onions! A roll! Why not?”

“I cannot! I ate already, in
mayn bungele
!”

“Grandma, do you have any
plain
cream cheese?”

“
Oy, ye! Ikh hob fargesn!
Yakob,
oytser
, treasure,
nem der
plain cream cheese
fun
Frigidaire.
Un
a seltzer
oykhet
,” as well.

“I’ll get it,” I say. “I’m closer!”

“Why? I am there already!” Jacob rises from his chair with a large gesture.

“He is there already!” explains Miriam. “
Es, mame sheyne
!” Eat, pretty mama, this is your job now. Try to be good at it.

This is a kind of utopia: a glimpse of both idealized future and past. Forty couples, many of them children together in Poland, spared in the war and determined to live with spirit, bought their colony for a future. Each inhabits a neat and perfect summer dwelling where one’s own standards, language, and cooking reigns.

There is pride of ownership and independence in
mayn bungele
, and at the same time it could well serve a socialist’s dream: A cooperative community of rules and order, where universal committee membership accomplishes maintenance, religious observance, improvements, and entertainment year after year. Hard work done willingly.

Yet no democracy is this. There are officers for life, male only, and each allotted a precious, status-conferring golf cart. Among these, my husband’s uncle, the redoubtable Uncle Fred, prime mover and organizer of this place, is mayor, holder of the keys, maintenance supervisor, quality-control man. He books the musicians, handles the taxes, orders the corned beef, buys the Saturday newspaper in town for our Jacob, his loved and respected older brother. Jacob does not drive on
Shabbas
.

Uncle Fred—still Fishl to Jacob—takes his wife, Pearl, shopping, and out to restaurants, and here and there. They like to go and do. Pearl is a perfectly groomed and certain sort of person, whose legs at seventy-something look better in shorts than mine, who once informed me that I was definitely not too young to have children, and again, later, that this was the final correct moment to buy a house, and so we did.

Fred motors about Green Gardens in his golf cart, seeing to a leaky faucet or a fallen tree. He takes in the harness races with a visiting son who calls this place
Greeneh
Gardens,
greeneh
being Yiddish-English slang for “immigrants.” Uncle Fred can do anything, and he knows everything. After the war, Pearl had the first winter coat and the first warm boots, of Russian army issue, and the first temporary apartment in Germany and then the first visa to New York: Fred’s doing. Later Fred schlepped paint cans on the subway from job to job until he could buy the first car, the first house.

It was Uncle Fred who explained at last this crowd’s aversion to the buffet meal. “I was in a concentration camp five years,” he said. “I don’t stand in line for food.” I blanched and cringed: my wedding. No one had told me, and I never understood for ten long years what was the matter quite, what …

At Green Gardens, Miriam and Jacob and Fred and Pearl have neighbors, real neighbors. They do informal favors for one another, they share food, they run to town for bread, they offer rides. The support network is there for them now as they age, as the number of widows grows, and the midsummer trips to doctors become more frequent. They meet for
davening
in the synagogue by morning, they have their tennis players and their card players, their golfers, their avid shoppers, their regular walkers. They have their gardeners, like Miriam, whose green thumb has splashed the front of her bungalow with gorgeous color each and every year.

Afternoon, when day’s work is done, they gather on the greensward to chat in Yiddish and sometimes in Polish. The women wear loose casual frocks and slippers by day. They dress after dinner. Every evening, there is coffee and cake in the card room, and Saturday night they throw themselves a party—splendid food, dancing, singing, entertainment.

It is a bit like going to Poland for the weekend. In a
shtetl
echo, peddlers pull up to the lawn in their Fords and pop the lids of trunks stuffed with pocketbooks or bath towels. A fish man from the Bronx stops by each week to sell herring and lox.

Down the road, a
frume
—religious—colony runs a kosher store, its moldy shelves stocking pickles, salami, shampoo. Fresh bread is displayed in a cardboard delivery carton, and endless children drip ice cream on the floor. A little store, as Miriam says, “like in Poland.”

This is where the walkers go. They have their route, these twenty years. From Green Gardens to the
frume
store is half a mile. Back is one. There and back again is two miles. In the sun, in the rain under an umbrella, after breakfast, before dusk. Never the other way, never up the road past meadow and butterfly, abandoned barn, overgrown graveyard, blackberry bramble, and cattail swamp, to where the running creek empties into pond, full of algae, bobbing beer cans, visiting birds, and a last few frogs. Always the same, reliable two-mile course, punctuated by the comforting sight of the
frume
store.

One woman, her son in the garment center, sells sweaters in her bungalow. Sweaters and dresses and men’s polo shirts, stuffed into closets and drawers and boxes. Another woman runs to her neighbor offering a
maykhl
, a savory morsel: stuffed turkey neck or calves’ foot jelly, with hard-boiled egg slices suspended in the sturdy aspic, a lemon slice on the side.

Once Miriam made potato latkes in the evening cool, and a dozen people managed to drop by. My children slathered on sour cream, sugar, applesauce.
Tante
Sonia waved her latke as the golf cart zipped her away to a committee meeting, Uncle Fred at the wheel. He likes to help out the ladies. He does whatever he can.