In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (68 page)

Once I suggested barbecue. Some of the bungalows do it, cooking up minute steaks without soiling or heating their always immaculate kitchens, fixed up more in the manner of miniature subdivision homes than 1940s-vintage Catskill bungalows.

“Probably they learned from their children,” remarked Miriam, with neither curiosity nor envy in her voice as she watched smoke rise from a charcoal burner a few doors down. Miriam, who could not afford a bungalow makeover, unknowingly made a virtue of preservation. Her bungalow is authentically beautiful. The walls are pine paneled, and she keeps them polished and clean. Accordion folding doors separate the two rooms. The children lay their hot faces on the cool linoleum floor. Mothballs scent the closet, vinyl valises are stowed under the white and gold bedroom furniture, hidden by dust ruffles of eyelet and voile. There is a big white freestanding stove in the pink-and-aqua tiled kitchen, and a plaid sleep-sofa hospitably placed along the far wall, under a sunburst-shaped electric clock ticking summer moments.

We eat our meals on an old metal table on the breezy screened porch, and our meals are the mythical food of vanished Polish summers.

When I said barbecue, my husband looked at his mother with mock interest, his eyebrows up, and mouth turned down, as if to say: “Why not try it,
Ema
?” They exchanged that merry, sour, mutual expression, mother and son.

“It’s too dirty,” I accused, and Miriam did not deny.

It was also wrong, I see now, the wrong aesthetic, to cook at the last minute over a hot fire, or worse, to see her husband standing on his feet in an apron tending black lumps of meat with a
groyser gopl
, a big fork, breathing carbonized fat.

So at other summer places, such as on my own patio back home, let hot dogs broil for dinner, among the mosquitoes. At Miriam’s we snug around the porch table at dusk as a faint breeze rises, flowered plates on our vinyl placemats. Miriam serves a pickled corned beef, simmered all day with pepper, garlic, cloves, bay leaf. She serves Israeli potato salad, made with cucumber pickles and onions and peas. We swallow stewed plums and cherries, chocolate marble cake, and a comforting cup of tea.

In the bungalow I am crowded, and I grow irritable. This is the bungalow: a porch, a front room that includes the kitchen, a bedroom with two double beds, a bathroom. When I come with the children and their belongings and my husband, we have seven people in this space, though it doesn’t look it. Miriam knows how to manage. She squirrels away everything, finding places where there are no places, so that the surfaces may appear clean, as they were. Still, rainy days are tough.

I’m on a short fuse here, and this makes me feel guilty. I think about the small cramped spaces occupied with dignity by Miriam early in her life. So she had to live, with others, several families sharing a room or two during the war.

After the war, there were transitional apartments in Germany and Israel, and later the immigrant digs in New York, always kept tidy and gleaming with a sense of worthy pride that no external darkness could extinguish in Miriam. And here I am complaining. I wish to arrive and spread out, be messy and relaxed. I’m an American, spoiled and despoiling. Despite myself I am the product of a frontier heritage and prosperous times.

“You shouldn’t know from it,” says Miriam, “how much a person can take.”

It took me too long with the yellow mushrooms.

I finally got to the country this year with chanterelles in a cool paper bag.

“We will cook them,” said Miriam.

She chopped onions and dried them with pepper over a high flame and added oil and fried the onions golden. She cleaned the mushrooms and added them whole to the hot oil and softened the mushrooms and tossed in a pat of butter too—“for the smell.” With a fork, she whipped up a whole pint of real sour cream, and she mixed it into the pot with a pinch of salt, a dash of paprika.

Miriam peeled Idaho potatoes, cut them into chunks and boiled them soft and dry. She dressed those steaming potatoes in that sour cream and chanterelle sauce. She had fish too, baked salmon; she had summer squash cooked with peppers and tomatoes; she had buttermilk for drinking. The hot, dry potato flesh absorbed the creamy sauce, and the mushrooms—

I looked out through the porch screen, pleasant and pleasured, removed from the clang and rush of the great world. Something basic and simple and splendidly civilized here. A respite if I want it. A gift. I made resolutions to try to be better.

You never tasted something like this
.

“Are these the
kushinushki
?” I asked Miriam.

She paused.

“I think it’s the same ones,” said Miriam. “I don’t remember.”

I was stunned, shocked. Three dangerous words for Miriam, who is—suddenly I see—more tired than I have ever seen her. Then I noticed the garden, beneath the porch, for the first year barely abloom. It was always the prettiest.

Every year, clematis vines twined up strings, petunias wagged their bonnets, dahlias pushed forth from bulbs. Every spring, right after Passover, Miriam starts her seeds in egg cartons under the sunny Bronx kitchen window—seeds saved from last year’s garden. She plants the seedlings Memorial weekend; by July, the bungalow is dressed in daisies and marigolds and asters and zinnias and mums and impatiens and black-eyed Susans. Nothing fancy, always beautiful, planned and tidy and reliable, the result of invisible effort, always eager to give delight. The kind of flowers she would have.

She barely gardened this year, Miriam. The flowers are sparse. Miriam is growing old.

In my life, I have said things, and done things, that I regret.

Appendices

L
INKS TO
M
ORE
S
OURCES
              

Annotated Bibliography

T
his annotated bibliography includes books, short stories, and essays about the Catskills. It does not include articles published in magazines and journals, most of which can be located in the bibliographies of the major historical works. The Catskills Institute Web site (
http://catskills.brown.edu
) contains more material, including unpublished memoirs, interviews, and novels in progress.

F
ICTION

Novels

Martin Boris,
Woodridge, 1946
(New York: Crown, 1980)

Martin Boris’s book centers on “Our Place,” a Woodridge restaurant, and its owners, workers, and customers. Boris grew up in Glen Wild, next to Woodridge, and knows the area well; he provides more local lore than most Catskills novels, including an account of daily life on a chicken farm, an important element of the Jewish presence in the Mountains. Restaurant owner Phil points to the ostentatious atmosphere of the resorts, yet knows well that hotel staff make up much of the restaurant’s clientele. As in most Catskills novels, there is a lot of sex. Among other things, Boris deals with conflicts between traditional religious traditions and leftist politics. Indeed, this book is one of the few writings we have that addresses communist and socialist activities in the Catskills. Some of the local activists go to Peekskill, on the other side of the Hudson, for the famous rally and concert where Paul Robeson sang and the participants were brutally attacked by the American Legion while police looked on (the actual rally was 1949, but Boris uses fictional license to place it in 1946). Even though the Catskills were just entering their golden age, the 1950s and 1960s, during which the expanded resort area would be larger than ever, Boris’s characters—drawing largely on their author’s experience—are worried about its decline.

Abraham Cahan,
The Rise of David Levinsky
(New York: Harper, 1917)

Abraham Cahan, founder and editor of the
Jewish Daily Forward
, was one of the most important American Jewish writers in the first half of this century. His classic novel,
The Rise of David Levinsky
, written in 1917, was the first piece of fiction in which the Catskills played an important part. Although the number of chapters is small, their significance is large. Levinsky’s rise from poverty to wealth and prestige turns him into a mean person, and our sympathies are usually not with this protagonist. What is significant about the novel is the portrayal of Catskills life. Levinsky vacations in the Tannersville area of the northern Catskills in northern Ulster and southern Greene counties, which became a resort area just before the more familiar Sullivan and southern Ulster counties did. Already, Cahan is telling stories of the large meals and the guests decked out in fancy dress. And romance in the Mountains is in the forefront. He is the first to describe the “husband train” or the “bull train” that brings the men up to their wives each weekend. Cahan also speaks of the pride that Yiddish speakers had in their
mamaloshen
(mother tongue), despite the antagonism of the elite German Jews who had inadvertently opened the region to their coreligionists. Cahan also captures the mutual accommodation to America: the Jewish diners cheer when the band in the dining room plays “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Beverly Friend,
Love in the Catskills: The Novel
(inspired by the musical comedy by Stan Turtletaub, Anita Turtletaub, and Tracy Friend) (privately printed, 1998; 106 pages; $12 from Beverly Friend, Oakton Community College, 1600 Golf Rd., Des Plaines, IL, 60016)

After seventy-four years on the job as a busy bellhop at a Catskills resort hotel, Sammy the matchmaking angel has one last chance to prove himself as a
shadchan
(matchmaker). If he fails to make
shidduchs
(matches) he will be consigned to Mohel Academy, where he will learn the new job of steadying mohels’ (ritual circumcisers’) hands for circumcisions. Sparks fly and complications arise when he attempts to mix and match secular Jews visiting the resort for a business meeting with orthodox Jews attending a singles’ weekend. The business meeting will clinch a big deal with Mr. Yamamoto’s microchip firm, but in fact Yamamoto also has an ethereal role. Romantic miscues run throughout the hectic weekend as people try to sort out love, religion, and work.

Allegra Goodman,
Kaaterskill Falls
(New York: Dial, 1998)

Goodman recounts the life of an ultraorthodox community that has recently established its summer outpost in the eastern section of the northern Catskills, near Haines Falls. Unlike the Eastern European Chasidic dynasties most people are familiar with, this Kirschner group (based on a real group of a different name) stems from Germany, and combines neo-orthodoxy with an appreciation of secular knowledge. The location is far from any of the Jewish resort areas, and the novel makes no mention of the resort industry. People live in houses they have bought or rented rather than in bungalow colonies. Still, for many readers the book is informative about the character of contemporary orthodox culture in at least one part of the Catskills. While plot is less important to Goodman than character development, the main action is the effort of Elizabeth Shulman to run a summer store catering to the local orthodox, who otherwise must carry everything up from the specific Washington Heights stores endorsed by their leader, Rav Kirshner. Rav Kirshner gives permission for his people to shop at Elizabeth’s store, but he soon dies, and his son withdraws it. Goodman’s characters are finely drawn, and she has a talent for portraying their psyches. One element in her setting is common to a number of Catskills communities—even though one sect dominates, there are interactions with other varieties of orthodoxy in the shul they all share.