In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (64 page)

Eating at the Hotel

Sara Sandberg

E
qually unchanging was the summer resort we patronized, Pasternack’s Palace (Father had originally been attracted to it by its name) in Fallsburg, Sullivan County. Irving driving, we would join the Fourth of July exodus to the mountains, not to return
en famille
(Irving would drive Father up for weekends) until after Labor Day.

We needed that nine-week vacation to recuperate from our trip.

In those days, motoring to the Catskills required almost as much fortitude as following the old Oregon Trail—and, it often seemed, practically as much time.

The Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, were in some Utopian future. There was, inexorably—aside from swimming with full pack—only one way to get from New York to New Jersey, through which we had to pass. That was by ferry.

The waiting lines would stretch, on holiday weekends, halfway, it would seem, around the world. We often waited two hours to make the twenty-minute crossing. The entire journey, to Fallsburg, took about eight—if you were lucky.

Those were trips that tried the souls of men—especially the souls of the Sandbergs, who were cowards to begin with. We would hold our breaths and pray while Irving negotiated, with our outmoded Cadillac’s aging brakes, the sharp, lofty curves, the terrifying ascents and descents, as we alternately climbed and coasted down the mountains, our hearts pounding, our brakes burning.

Only the visions of the rural delights awaiting us at Pasternack’s Palace sustained us throughout this ordeal. This was long before the fabulous era of Grossinger’s and the Concord, of stage shows, swimming pools, and social directors. Catskill hotels were invariably bedizened with highly euphemistic names—Glick’s Mansion, Mandelbaum’s Manor, Spitzer’s Floral House, Moscowitz’s Mayflower Inn—but most of them were actually farms to which a boardinghouse had been appended.

As a result, every rustic joy was ours, the anticipation of which—as the houris awaiting him in Mohammed’s Paradise sustain the Arab—enabled us to endure the shattering trials of those trips.

Visions—when we discovered Irving had made a wrong turn and we were hopelessly lost, with less than a gallon of gas, in some primeval wilderness—of swinging languorously in hammocks under the trees until we grew nauseous … of taking gay, itchy rides in the hay wagons ’neath a romantic Fallsburg moon … of drinking milk, warm and sweet and full of bacteria, straight from the cows; of eating eggs, raw, fresh from the chickens.

Visions—when we got a flat and found that our spare, too, had a flat—of crossing a meadow full of morning glories and daisies and black-eyed Susans, which Goldie and I wove into garlands as we plunged toward our destination, the Nevasink River, in whose crystal-clear depths we would thrash about, wearing black cotton bathing suits and long black stockings and supported by water wings because we weren’t completely sold on that Nevasink claim.

Visions—when our motor overheated in the bumper-to-bumper traffic and we broiled under a searing July sun waiting for it to cool off—of doubles and triples of wonderful, indigestible foods. These were my family’s visions—not mine. For me they were a nightmare. Mother, always one to prod my meager appetite, would now—since each meal had to be paid for whether it was consumed or not—literally stuff me.

“Sara, you hardly touched the borscht—that you never tasted anything like it in your life!” Mother would use the same hard sell on me that proved so successful in the store.

“Mother,” I would plead, “I ate half of it.”

“Yeah, but with not a drop of sour cream—and with only one potato!”

She would seize my bowl, fill it to overflowing from the pitcher of sour cream which, like pot cheese, was a staple of every mountain hotel, toss in two more jumbo potatoes.

“Here,
fargrinte
, eat—that you look like you’re passing out from consumption!” Any child of that era, to be healthy, had to be fat. If you were skinny, as I was, your life was considered to be hanging by a thread.

“Mother, I can’t!” I would protest piteously. “I’ll vomit!”

“Force yourself. You’ll see how you’ll stretch your stomach.”

Since Mother did not have the business to attend to and eating three huge meals a day was the chief pastime at the hotel, she was able, to my grief, to give the matter her complete, undivided attention.

My plates seemed bewitched. As quickly as I emptied them they seemed magically to replenish themselves. And how often, when she thought I wasn’t looking, did I catch Mother pouring the milk from my glass and replacing it with straight sweet cream!

“Just watch how lovely Goldele eats!” She would beam as my sister consumed, like her parents, an appetizer of chopped liver, stuffed
derma
, or
gefilte
fish; chicken soup or
borscht
; boiled
flanken
, pot roast, or endless variations of chicken; plus side dishes of potato or
lukshen kugel
,
tsimmes
,
holishkas
,
kasha varnishkas
; to say nothing of dill pickles, sauerkraut, and pickled tomatoes—and, naturally, a little fruit, like stewed prunes or figs; followed, of course, by dessert: apple strudel, honeycake—meals that, more than the persecution of two thousand years, have made the survival of the Jews a miracle!

Not only did my family stow away at table banquets that resembled the last meal of a condemned prisoner, but whatever might be left over Mother would wrap in a napkin, stash away in the huge purse she carried for this purpose, and nonchalantly bear off to her room—“in case we should get hungry for a snack in between.” You could find almost anything in Mother’s room—ranging from Bing cherries to half a chicken.

Visions—when we finally arrived, our clothes sticking to us like Scotch tape, every bone, especially the ones we sat on, individually aching, and discovered that the valise containing all our shoes had been left behind—visions that varied for each one of us in kind….

Visions for Goldie of new boys to be captivated: bellboys, bus boys, guest boys.

Visions for Irving of new girls, ditto: chambermaids, waitresses, single girls who were looking, married girls who were looking.

Visions for me of fresh fodder for my fevered imagination. That elderly man who looked so distressed—mightn’t he be suffering, not from gallstones, as he glibly explained, but from some searing secret sorrow?

Visions for Father and Mother of getting a desperately needed sojourn in the sun, of new friends to be made—new customers.

Our summers were not only pleasant but profitable. Mother, who attracted friends the way an empty seat draws mangled straphangers at rush hour, would distribute her business cards to each new acquaintance as she tenderly bade her
adieu
. In due course, practically every one of them would appear at the store, as though by posthypnotic suggestion, for a new coat, a “remodel,” a collar and cuffs, storage.

I shall never forget the unvarying sign that our summer idyll was coming to an end.

“Sandberg,” Mother would say that last week, with a catch in her voice at the thought of parting with all her friends at Pasternack’s Palace, “Sandberg, when you come out for the weekend—don’t forget to bring our cards!”

The Catskills Remembered

Vivian Gornick

I
have never been able to think of the old Catskill Mountains hotel circuit as the actual setting for all those borscht belt jokes. For me, a college student waitressing in the late fifties, the Catskills was a wild place, dangerous and exciting, where all the beasts were predatory, none pacific. The years I spent working in those hotels were my introduction to the brutishness of function, the murderousness of fantasy, the isolation inflicted on all those living inside a world organized to provide pleasure. It’s the isolation I’ve been thinking about lately—how remarkably present it was, crude and vibrant, there from the first moment of contact.

I walked into Stella Mercury’s employment agency one afternoon in the winter of my freshman year at City College. Four men sat playing cards with a greasy deck, chewing gum methodically, never looking up once. The woman at the desk, fat and lumpy with hard eyes and a voiceful of cigarette wheeze, said to me, “Where ya been?” and I rattled off a string of hotels. “Ya worked all those places,” she said calmly. “Ain’t the human body a mah-h-vellous thing, ya don’t look old enough to have worked half of ’em.” I stood there, ill with fear that on the one hand she’d throw me out and on the other she’d give me a job, and assured her that I had. She knew I was lying, and I knew that she knew I was lying, but she wrote out a job ticket anyway. Suddenly I felt lonely inside the lie, and I begged her with my eyes to acknowledge the truth between us. She didn’t like that at all. Her own eyes grew even harder, and she refused me more than she had when I’d not revealed open need. She drew back with the ticket still in her hand. I snatched at it. She laughed a nasty laugh. And that was it, all of it, right there, two flights above Times Square, I was in the mountains.

That first weekend in a large glittering hotel filled with garment district salesmen and midtown secretaries, weaving clumsily in and out of the vast kitchen all heat and acrimony (food flying, trays crashing, waiters cursing), I gripped the tray so hard all ten knuckles were white for days afterward, and every time I looked at them I recalled the astonishment I’d felt when a busboy at the station next to mine stuck out his fist to a guest who’d eaten three main dishes and said, “Want a knuckle sandwich?” But on Sunday night when I flung fifty single dollar bills on the kitchen table before my open-mouthed mother there was soft exultancy, and I knew I’d go back. Rising up inside this brash, moralistic, working-class girl was the unexpected excitement of the first opportunity for greed.

I was eighteen years old, moving blind through hungers whose force I could not grasp. Unable to grasp what drove me, I walked around feeling stupid. Feeling stupid I became inept. Secretly, I welcomed going to the mountains. I knew I could do this hard but simple thing. I could enter that pig-eyed glitter and snatch from it the soft, gorgeous, fleshy excitement of quick money. This I could master. This, I thought, had only to do with endurance; inexhaustible energy; and that I was burning up with.

The summer of my initiation I’d get a job, work two weeks, get fired. “You’re a waitress? I thought you said you were a waitress. What kinda waitress sets a table like that? Who you think you’re kidding, girlie?” But by Labor Day I
was
a waitress and a veteran of the first year. I had been inducted into an underclass elite, a world of self-selected Orwellian pariahs for whom survival was the only value.

At the first hotel an experienced waiter, attracted by my innocence, took me under his wing. In the mountains, regardless of age or actual history, your first year you were a virgin and in every hotel there was always someone, sentimental as a gangster, to love a virgin. My patron in this instance was a twenty-nine-year-old man who worked in the post office in winter and at this hotel in summer. He was a handsome vagrant, a cunning hustler, what I would come by the end of the summer to recognize as a “mountain rat.”

One night a shot rang out in the sleeping darkness. Waiters and waitresses leaped up in the little barracks building we shared at the edge of the hotel grounds. Across the wide lawn, light filled the open doorway of one of the distant guest cottages. A man stood framed in the light, naked except for a jockstrap. Inside the barracks people began to laugh. It was my handsome protector. He’d been sleeping with a woman whose gambler husband had appeared unexpectedly on a Thursday night.

The next day he was fired. We took a final walk together. I fumbled for words. Why? I wanted to know. I knew he didn’t like the woman, a diet-thin blonde twenty years older than himself. “Ah-h-h,” my friend said wearily. “Doncha know nothing, kid? Doncha know what I am? I mean, whaddaya think I am?”

At the second hotel the headwaiter, a tall sweating man, began all his staff meetings with, “Boys and girls, the first thing to understand is, we are dealing here with animals.” He stood in the dining-room doorway every morning holding what I took to be a glass of apple juice until I was told it was whiskey neat. “Good morning, Mrs. Levine,” he’d nod affably, then turn to a busboy and mutter, “That Holland Tunnel whore.” He rubbed my arm between his thumb and his forefinger when he hired me and said, “We’ll take care of each other, right, kid?” I nodded, thinking it was his way of asking me to be a responsible worker. My obtuseness derailed him. When he fired me and my friend Marilyn because he caught us eating chocolate tarts behind an alcove in the dining room he thundered at us, his voice hoarse with relief, “You are not now waitresses, you never were waitresses, you’ll never
be
waitresses.”

At the third hotel I had fifty dollars stolen from me at the end of a holiday weekend. Fifty dollars wasn’t fifty dollars in the mountains, it was blood money. My room was crowded with fellow workers, all silent as pallbearers. The door racketed open and Kennie, a busboy who was always late, burst into the room. “I heard you had money stolen!” he cried, his face stricken. I nodded wordlessly. Kennie turned, pulled the door shut, twisted his body about, raised his arm and banged his fist, sobbing, against the door. When I said, “What are
you
getting so excited about?” he shrieked at me, “Because you’re a waitress and a human being! And I’m a busboy and a human being!” At the end of the summer, four more robberies having taken place, the thief was caught. It was Kennie.