In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (67 page)

It is secular, our colony, and religious too: live and let live, a virtuous stance. There are ladies in hair-rollers hitchhiking rides on golf carts to the laundry shed on Saturday, and grandchildren whose ritual fringes hang out of their soccer shirts. There are men in skullcaps playing cards on a Friday night. There are women at the beauty parlor on
Shabbas
, while their husbands read Torah with tears in their eyes. There are grandfathers out to Pizza Hut with the children, while their wives make two sets of dishes somehow fit on a bungalow shelf. Two sets of dishes, two sets of spoons, two sets of pots in a tiny little country kitchen.

Comes a knock on the door any day at dawn, and Jacob makes his way to the
shul
to fill out a
minyan
. The little
shul
is lovely, peaceful, filled with colored light. The members built and furnished it. One, a talented artist, crafted the stained glass windows. Another is a rabbi, still another a trained Torah reader. That man bought the prayer books, that one contributed the
bima
, the pulpit. This one donated the Torah scroll.

It is a bit of the fabled Borscht Belt on Saturday night. At 8:15 sharp the whole colony is in the casino, with any friends, children, grandchildren spending the night. The women are coifed, the casino is decorated, everyone is dressed to the nines. The band is playing, perhaps an ensemble of keyboard, percussion, and sax. Start with a
forshpays
, appetizer—chick peas, chunks of pumpernickel-and-rye marble bread, schmaltz herring. Each fine herring bone was tweezed from the velvety fish flesh by this week’s ladies’ committee on Friday at 7
A.M.
in the big kitchen that once served the hotel. I saw them. The ladies in their housedresses worked together, slicing the herrings, dressing them in oil and chopped purple onion. Two men run an open bar for exactly one hour: vodka, whiskey, scotch, orange juice, soda, ginger ale, Coke, ice.

“That’s it,” say the men as the ice melts down. “The bar is officially closed.”

There is a sit-down meal, delicatessen or smoked fish, salads and cookies and cakes. A singer may belt out in Yiddish, French, Italian, Hebrew, or English, and where did these people learn all the words? And is there a language they do not know? for they sing along unapologetically and with feeling. They laugh at a raucous comic spiel, and dance waltzes, Israeli circle dances, Russian dances, two-step, disco. I dance with my children, and dance with my father-in-law.

Until one in the morning they dance, long after we, the visiting children, tired out by our frantic middle-aged lives, have rolled into embroidered bungalow beds.

Miriam’s place, Green Gardens, recalls the region’s Jewish heyday, already past peak in the 1950s as these folks got back on their shaky but determined feet. It is New York, with its sense of escape from the oppressive heat of immigrant urbana. It conjures the
kokh-aleyns
, the housekeeping cottages of Rockaway Beach, that my father knew as a Brooklyn child. It reverberates with the spirit of the grand resort hotels. It is a last hurrah for all of that, in the Jewish style at least—for the Catskills are still to be discovered by newer groups of immigrant strivers, Korean, Jamaican, Chinese, Dominican. They, the new
greeneh
, will find that the real estate is cheap and plentiful, the air is fresh and the children can run, and that a bungalow colony can be imagined any of a thousand perfect ways.

Miriam’s bungalow colony is socialist, private, foreign, American, New York, past, and present. It is work and vacation, reality and idyll. It is the apotheosis of valuable Jewish things in my past as I knew them. It is an oasis out of time. All my roads have led here. But I am only a facilitator after all. This place belongs not to me—who gets cranky sharing two rooms and a bath with six other people and sitting down to eat on schedule—but to the grandparents, and the grandchildren too.

By the time she was three, my daughter was staying here for stretches of time on her own. She swung in the hammock and watered the flowers. She went to town with her grandparents to shop, for a frilly dress, a little toy, a book of puzzles. She went to the beauty parlor with her grandmother and had her nails painted red. She went to the card room. She dressed up for the parties. There was no bedtime. Mornings, she slept in, watched cartoons, had chocolate milk for breakfast.

“It’s not a wholesome environment,” I complained once to my husband. He laughed.

“Give her a bath and wash her hair tonight,” I told Miriam by phone during one of these visits. Later I learned my daughter had stormed out of doors, leaving an angry note: “
I COME TO BUGLO TO BE FREE
.” The E’s faced backward, as in my own printing at six years of age, when I also longed for freedom.

I close my eyes and I see: that six-year-old girl on the screened front porch, making
kreplekh
, filled dumplings, with her grandmother. Miriam showing her how to place a glass, precisely so, on a rolled-out sheet of noodle dough. Lifting the round with a butter knife, placing on it a bit of sweetened farmer cheese or blueberries. Folding the circle in half, pinching the edges together, effecting a succulent dairy won ton. She, the girl, totally absorbed, eager to be good at it. Learning a small bit of lore. So it shouldn’t be lost. Blueberry
kreplekh
.

Once when I was a new bride we sat on the porch of the bungalow talking into Friday night, as the Sabbath candles flickered and fireflies danced outside. Miriam spoke of Poland, and childhood. Her village, hard by the town of Radom, was shadowed by forest. She and her mother used to go to the woods in May to pick mushrooms. There were so many kinds of mushrooms, she told me. One kind for drying, for soups, another for cooking fresh—the best mushrooms in the world came from her forest in Poland.

Especially one kind she remembered, that she had not seen since the old days: a little yellow mushroom, like a chicken’s foot, a mushroom called a
kushinushki
, a Polish name. She rhapsodized over those yellow mushrooms.

“My mother used to cook them with sour cream, to eat with potatoes. You never tasted something like this.”

Back home that week, I recalled the discussion. At a fancy Manhattan produce boutique I rooted. There, in the tempting fungal array, was a bin of precious chanterelles. They fit the description, yellow, small, shaped like a little chicken’s foot, plump and eager. I would bring a bag to the bungalow, I decided, although I could never tell Miriam how much they cost. She had never even seen them in her America: they were not to be had in the Northeast Bronx.

But week after week, rolling into months, there was no intersection between market visits and trips to the Green Gardens colony. As I rushed out of town on a Friday, a billion things to remember pushed any thought of mushroom from my mind. If I went to the market, it meant we were staying in town the weekend. At the market I remembered. Making my country lists, I forgot.

That summer went by, and the next, and the next. In between, Miriam cooked mushrooms from supermarket tins, cooked dried mushrooms from plastic wrappings. Many a fall, winter, and spring went by with mushrooms. Miriam sautéed mushrooms with onions and chopped them finely into hard-cooked eggs and mayonnaise and dill to spread on fresh breads and rolls. With drippings and garlic and a bit of flour, her stewed mushrooms swam in a luxurious gravy over veal meat balls.

Darkly crisped mushrooms and slivered onions festooned her
farfel
, a kind of steamed and fried pasta used as a side dish. In winter, when Sabbath comes early, we sometimes sat down on a Friday eve to Miriam’s slow-roasted
dekl
, a cut of beef softer than brisket, that in Miriam’s kitchen is baked under a mellifluous crust of sliced mushrooms, oil, garlic, parsley, pepper, paprika. And served on a silver-rimmed meat dish beside a heap of kasha
varnishkes
—buckwheat groats with bowtie noodles.

“These mushrooms are nothing,” Miriam would say from time to time, as we swooned, “compared to the little yellow mushrooms we used to get in Poland.” She would pause, alone in the memory. “Little yellow mushrooms, like a chicken’s foot.”

The comment would prick my complacency, reignite my resolve.
Chanterelles
.

One summer Friday at last I remembered. The luggage for the country was already packed, and I was leaving work early with time to spare. I stopped at the market and filled a bag with tender yellow gleanings, a plastic bag, wondering idly if paper wouldn’t be better, but they were out of paper bags, then I forgot about it. Forgot, walking home twenty blocks in humid summer heat; forgot, packing the car, forgot while driving, and in a traffic jam, and stopping to change diapers and fill the gas tank, and—I squirm to recall—parking under hot summer heat in an asphalt parking lot while I explored a newly opened factory outlet mall on the way to Green Gardens.

Unpacking, I remembered. There they were in their plastic bag. I set them on the table.

“What is this?” asked Miriam, holding up the warm, damp bag.

“Yellow mushrooms—but I think—”

“These are
kushinushki
!”

“Are they?”

“Where ever did you find them?” Miriam bundled them into the refrigerator, behind something, under something.

“
Ema
, I don’t know if they are good.”

“They are good!” assured Miriam.

Just then a baby called, a child needed me. I meant to get back to the mushrooms, those perishable fungi, but I always have too much on my mind. We left early on the Sunday … and it was the end of the week before we spoke.

“Those mushrooms—” Miriam began.

“Oh, no.”

“They aren’t the
kushinushki
.”

“No?”

“We went and bought all the things for the mushrooms—sour cream, potatoes,” recounted Miriam.

“You didn’t—eat them?”

“I prepared them for the
Abba
. They looked the same, but they didn’t taste good. They were terrible. Nothing like
kushinushki
.”

I might have killed my husband’s parents. Thank God, thank luck, thank evolution and genetics, that I did not.

Such are the dangers of careless daughters-in-law, and the perils, perhaps? of trying to go home again, as I vicariously was.