Three Jewish Farm Boys in the Catskills in the Depression

I’d like to fold time like an accordion. “It will be fine,” I’d like to tell them.

I have been time tunneling in the Catskills, going to this pile of stones or that overgrown acre of land, sometimes with an old postcard or photo, trying to envision structures that are no longer there: A grand hotel on a mountaintop; a lakeside changing room; a summer camp for boys where, in the early 1900s, the teenage Lorenz Hart perhaps tossed around ideas with fellow camper Oscar Hammerstein.

 I am working on a novel, “perhaps” is permitted.

Perhaps there was something in the air on Belleayre Mountain that inspired Lorenz Hart, to both me and my lovelorn protagonist, the finest lyricist who ever lived, to write, “The Shortest Day of the Year.”

Perhaps Amelita Galli-Curci, the coloratura soprano who built an estate on Belleayre in 1922 and also figures in the novel, sang an aria so beautiful that the birds picked it up and passed it down, generation to generation, so even today you can hear the yellow warblers and gray catbirds singing it.

 I grew up in these Catskills. Do not confuse them, please, with the Borscht Belt Catskills of “Dirty Dancing”, home to Grossinger’s and the Concord and Brown’s. Those were the southern Catskills where the hotel owners had been smart enough to winterize their buildings, build indoor pools, and bring in celebrity entertainment. They could compete in the vacation market when cheap airfare arrived in the 1960s.

 My Catskills, anchored by the town of Fleischmanns, was in the ‘60s the arson belt, where hotels were torched at the end of the summer season for the insurance.  My family referred to this as “tragedy.”

“Tragedy is going to strike this weekend at the Roaring Brook, so if there’s anything you want, get it now,” my mother, Milly, would say.

Where tragedy hadn’t yet struck, there were the bodies of hotels; dead, dying, and mortally wounded; heavy with the smell of mildewed mattresses and wood rot.

 “What made them move here in the middle of nowhere?” the teenage me, already focused on escaping to Greenwich Village, wondered.

The thought never occurs to me that when my family arrived here, in the early 1900s, that Fleischmanns, which took the name of its wealthy Jewish benefactors, was a boom town. The Grand Hotel in Highmount has 400 rooms; the Ulster and Delaware Railroad brings thousands of tourists from New York City every summer.  

The grandfather I am named for, Jake Wadler, a Polish tailor, buys a dairy farm to get the deferment that will keep him out of World War One, and takes in boarders in summer, as many farmers do. He calls his place “The Maplewood House.” It is advertised as “kosher-style,” which is code for “Jewish clientele,” not really necessary in the Fleischmanns of that time, I would think, but maybe with the “No Jews or Dogs” signs on hotels in neighboring towns, he wasn’t taking any chances.

 Jake marries a guest, Gussie Belinksy, a New York City garment worker who has come to the mountains to recover from the 1918 flu epidemic, and they have three sons. The oldest is my father, Bernie.

 Jake dies in June 1941, when a heavy branch falls on his head after a thunderstorm. Or maybe, as is rumored, he is killed in a fight with a neighbor.  The family does not pursue it. Year-round Jewish residents are a minority; my grandmother does not speak English; my father is only 19. The boarding house expands, with more buildings and a dining hall.  When, exactly, it becomes a hotel, I can’t say. Perhaps when the family puts in a pool, but never is also a possibility. It isn’t a fancy spot.

I remember some of it, from the ‘50s, the dying days of small dairy farms and hotels; New York City guests who sit around card tables with maple leaves on their noses to prevent sunburn; dishwashers who dry the silverware by shaking it in pillowcases; a cousin from the city who gives cha-cha lessons on the farmhouse porch, “One, two, cha-cha-cha” echoing over the PA system. The guests are working-class people, who drive cabs in the city or work in the garment district.

 “In the city, they sit behind a sewing machine all day, but when they come to the mountains, they’re all designers,” my mother, who cannot stand the guests, says.

Getting a picture of the family’s earlier years, the Depression and the early ’40s after my grandfather dies, is difficult. My family doesn’t tell a lot of stories about it. I have only fragments.

The family is poor, though in the Depression, everybody is poor.  My grandfather sometimes spends winters in the city, working for a brother or cousin, fixing lamps, or making hats. The day after Jake is killed, a man from the bank comes to see my grandmother and tells her she should give up the property; she will never make it on her own. The Wadlers in the city do not help the Wadlers in the country, for which they will never be forgiven.

By the mid-60s, my family is out of the hotel business and I go to New York. When I come home to visit, I stay away from the property, I know it’s a wreck.

But researching my novel, I need to go back and my cousin, Steven, the son of my father’s late brother, Hymie, wants to know what the boarding house was like, so back we go, in a handsome red pickup truck from the family’s building-supply business, with “Wadler Bros, Inc.,” on the door. 

We leave Fleischmanns on a blacktop, county road, time traveling. It’s jarring to go places you haven’t been in years; being thrown back and forth against the walls of an elevator that’s falling. It isn’t that the memories are bad or good, it’s just forgotten cross-sections of your life, coming at you fast:

That was Lake Switzerland, where I swam in summer and the changing room smelled of mold; that deserted wooden building at the crossroads was the post office and general store; the owners kept a raccoon out back. The small wooden building was the Grange Hall, where the farmers had meetings, just like in a Norman Rockwell painting.  

Five miles out of Fleischmanns, down a blacktop road, we come to the old property. The out-buildings and barn are gone, the pool has been filled in, and the main house, the farmhouse, is deserted and on the verge of collapse. 

Even so, I’m back seventy years ago, at a Jewish hotel full of life and and food and noise: There was a wide porch in front of the farmhouse, I tell Steven. There was a soda dispenser in the corner, where I got orange soda. When the bottles came out, they were wet with condensation.  The dining hall was next to the farmhouse. Our grandmother announced meals by ringing a large bell.

We walk around to the back of the farmhouse. There were chicken coops there, I say. An old Russian hired man named Mike who got drunk whenever he went into town lived in a shack there. Here, under these brambles, you can see the footprint of the barn. When I was very small, your father was milking a cow and bent its udder and sprayed some milk at me.  The milk room, where the tall milk cans were kept in spring water, was here. Or was it there?   

Then I remember a blurry photo of my father and uncles as boys, which I only just discovered and had quickly copied to my phone.

I pull it up. It’s eerie.  My father and his two brothers are standing behind the farmhouse, in the same spot my cousin Steven is standing now. If time were an accordion and I could collapse it, they would see him.     

It is not a happy photo. My father, maybe 15 or 16, looks worried and has an arm protectively around his youngest brother, Hymie. Artie, the middle brother, seems to be aiming a make-believe gun at the camera. Hymie, who looks six or seven but is so skinny it’s hard to tell, clings anxiously to his older brother. Given their ages, the photo had to have been taken in the late 30s, during the Depression. None of their clothes fit. Artie’s shorts are too baggy, Hymie’s jumper is too small, my father may be wearing his father’s shirt.

I’d like to walk through time and tell them it will all be okay: They will build a successful business. Hymie’s children will make it even bigger; Artie’s son will save lives; I will go to New York and be a newspaper reporter. It will all turn out fine.

I wish all the cousins were here, so we could do a next-generation photo that I could give the brothers when scientists learn how to bend time.  I ask Steven if he would like me to take his picture, standing in the same spot. But he’s got what he came for, so we get back in the truck and head home.

I don’t think I will go back.