catskills

August 2, 1926 – Brooklyn

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[Note: To see large scans of Papa’s letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

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New York Aug 1. 1926

August 2, 1926

9 P.M.

My dear Jeanie: –

I am glad at this time to inform you
that Honey is O.K. I called up Rose
just before, Sally answered the phone
she said that he isn’t home any more
he is all well and at this time playing
outside with the kids.1

I tried to call up your father but there
was no answer, I suppose that he must
be in the restaurant now.2

I was in C.I. last night, I took the
Iron Steamboat to the Battery, oh how
it was lonesome, my other friends do
not seem to interest me much now. — 3

Oh Jeanie, you ought to be glad to
be away from the City, this is another
hot day like those of 2 weeks ago
a little shower would be a great relief,4

I do not write much now as I am a little
fatigued from business, but one of this weeks
letters will surely be a bigger one.

Regards to dear mother.

With love,

Harry

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1 – Honey, as we’ve mentioned before, was the nickname for Harold, the son of my grandmother’s sister Rose. My grandmother and great-grandmother, who were both vacationing at the Lakeside Inn in Ferndale, NY when Papa wrote this letter, would have been anxious to hear about Harold’s health if he had been ill. My mother tells me that no one in my grandmother’s family liked to use telephones, so this may have been the first news they had of Harold’s recovery.

2 – My great-grandfather was, according to family lore, a rather imperious, traditional sort of man. As such, he certainly wouldn’t have been able to cook for himself, so he must gone out to eat a lot when his wife and daughters weren’t around. I imagine he ate at the same restaurant all the time since Papa refers to it only as “the restaurant” and not by name.

3 – The Iron Steamboat Company started running a ferry from Manhattan to Coney Island in the late 1800’s, and at the time Papa wrote this letter would drop its passengers exclusively at Steeplechase Pier. (Steeplechase Pier was was an entrance to Steeplechase Park, one of Coney’s most famous amusement parks. The Iron Steamboat Company started bringing passengers there in 1911.) The undated postcards below (from a site hosted at USGenNet.org) show a couple of Iron Steamboats in action:

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Papa seems to attribute his loneliness and lack of interest in his friends to my grandmother’s absence, but, interestingly, this isn’t the first time he’s been hit with a blue mood on a Coney Island ferry. His June 22, 1924 diary entry describes a similar experience:

The heat chased me out
to Coney Island, where I
took the first dive in the
cool ocean. Lonely I spent
there several hours and
in the evening I certainly
was refreshed by the cool
ocean breezes on the boat
ride back to town.

I could have stayed on the
island later, but I escaped
the gay throngs on the boardwalk
there was no place for a lone
sad man, to get that boat, but
on the boat again were gay couples
which in my loneliness tended to
make me sadder.

Papa wrote this diary entry a few weeks after his father’s death, a time when he was subject to long bouts of melancholy. In subsequent weeks he would visit Coney Island frequently, but he often felt low and would occasionally take leave of his friends to say kaddish in a nearby synagogue. I wonder, then, if he continued to associate Coney Island with those difficult times and if, when he wrote the above letter to my grandmother two years later, his mournful memories triggered his “lonesome” feelings and his seemingly inexplicable desire to separate from his friends.

I’ve also speculated that crowded boats full of people like himself recalled even more distant memories of his passage to America and, by extension, the family he left behind and missed so terribly. Did all this make his longing for my grandmother even more keen, his loneliness more pronounced?

4 – Temperatures were at 88 and rising on the day Papa wrote this letter, though the late July heat wave he refers to was even worse, with temperatures topping off at 97. The New York Times headlines of the day told tales of massive Coney Island crowds and heat-related deaths and prostrations (see references below). It was certainly a few degrees cooler and less dangerous in “The Mountains”, as my grandmother called the Catskills, where the Lakeside Inn was located.

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References:

August 5, 1926 – Brooklyn

by

[Note: Papa wrote two letters in a half-hour span on this day, so I’ve posted them both here.]

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August 5, 1926

8 P.M.

My dear Jeanie:

Sally just told me that you were not
feeling well which made me worry.
Please dear be careful as you are
not accustomed to the foods they serve.1
There is nothing new at home, everyone
in the family is enjoying good health.
Sally made supper tonight for dad.2

I would enjoy immensely to hear
from you in detail of how you are
spending in the country. Won’t you dear
spare a few minutes and write me a
nice long letter.

I regret that to my dissappointment
your dress is not in yet, write me whether
I should mail it to you if I should get
it before Monday. —

Today the city was able to catch its
breath in the soothing breezes that came
rather unexpectedly.3

Remember dear that my thoughts now
are of you only, it would perhaps be selfishness
on my part to ask you to write me daily
but please keep me informed often enough
during your brief stay there of your welfare,

Loving regards to Mother.

Your Harry

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August 5, 1926

8:30 P.M.

My dear Jeanie:

5 Minutes after I mailed to
you the letter my next door neighbor
brought in your letter where you
inform me of your sickness which
alarmed me greatly and causes
me much worry.

I am sending you the stamp
which I have at the house now
I will send you some more.4

I pray that your health be
quickly restored.

I tried to call Rose and tell her
to write to you, but there was nobody
at home.

Trusting to hear of your
well being,

I am as ever

Your Harry

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Matt’s Notes

1 – The Jewish resort region in the Catskills had a lot of nicknames, but “Borscht Belt”, the most time-tested and definitive, is clearly the most fitting because it makes a reference to food. People like my grandmother may have fanned out across the area each summer to breathe the air, make romance, and enjoy the region’s soon-to-be eponymous entertainment genre, but they were also there to eat huge quantities of kosher cuisine.

Hotel menus from the Borscht Belt’s golden age offered a Greek diner’s worth of choices at every meal, and guests at most hotels could sample as many and as much as they could handle. Borscht was ubiquitous, of course (and always served with a potato, according to my mother) but any hotel kitchen worth its salt offered, in addition to traditional Jewish fare, “Continental” dishes with names fancied up by French-sounding suffixes. Like many Yiddish words, “Borscht” seems like the punch line to a joke that’s never been told yet everyone knows; taken together, a listing of Borscht Belt menu items has, I think, a similar effect:

  • Baked or Fried Herring with Potato
  • Heart’s Delight Prune Juice
  • Cream of Sun Ripened Tomatoes
  • Cold Shav (a sour, sorrel drink, rooted like Borscht in Eastern Europe)
  • Plain or Omelette Confiture
  • Fresh Mushroom Pie Jardiniere
  • Spaghetti Italienne
  • Cheese Blintzes, Sour Cream
  • Cauliflower Polonaise
  • Fillet of Matzes Herring in Wine Sauce
  • Cantonese Style Vegetable Chow Mein
  • Gefilte Fish Balls, Mother’s Style, Casserole
  • Individual Greek Salad, Herring Tidbits (Jewish style “Greek” salad had a foundation of greens, olives, onions and herring; my mother tells me that Papa liked to order it for lunch at Garment District eateries)
  • Fluffy Plain or Jelly Omelette, Garniture
  • Heavy Sour Cream with fruit

And that’s just breakfast and lunch. For dinner, my grandmother might have had liver steak with onions, a nice stuffed chicken, boiled beef flanken (a.k.a. short ribs), brisket, corned beef, steak, chopped egg salad, pickles, Linzer torte, sponge cake, and perhaps a little pudding. Though my grandmother was conditioned to such stuff due to my great-grandmother’s mastery of fatty cooking, Papa’s letter implies that the onslaught in the Lakeside Inn’s dining room had caused her some kind of gastrointestinal distress.

2 – My grandmother may have been vomiting her brains out, but it was still important for her to know that her father eating properly. (My great-grandmother was vacationing with my grandmother at this time, and, as we’ve learned, my great-grandfather often went out to eat under such circumstances.)

3 – As Papa noted in a previous letter, New York had been in the grip of a deadly heat wave for several days.

4 – In his last letter to my grandmother, Papa displayed some frustration with her continued indifference to his romantic overtures, and in previous letters showed how worried he was about her finding new boyfriends on her vacation. The two letters above are, I think, the most overtly anxious he’s written, not just because they discuss my grandmother’s illness but because Papa reveals how badly he wants to know how she’s spending her time, and with whom. His requests for letters sound more like pleas than usual, and when she writes him with news about her illness his first reaction is to send her a stamp so she can write again. That’s not to say he wasn’t really concerned about her health, but his concern over losing her seems to be the real subject of this letter.

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I’m not sure why I’ve had trouble finding photos of the Lakeside Inn until now, but at last the Internets have coughed up a couple. One appears on page 78 of a book called Catskill Hotels, by Irwin Richman, and is viewable here through Google Books. The other, shown below, comes from a site called “The Catskills Institute,” and shows the Inn’s “Pool, Sun Deck and Patio.”

Hopefully my grandmother got to spend at least a little time there between bouts of whatever symptoms her illness caused.

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Additional References:

  • A number of Borscht Belt menus appear in the book Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area by Paul Brown.