Borscht Belt Bungalows: Memoirs Of Catskill Summers

3. Farmer's Life

Farmers Life W hile many resorts emerged from farms, this was not always the case. Hotel and bungalow colony owners came from differing backgrounds. Some used the mountains as an escape; several saw the industry as a way to move up in the world; others had more personal reasons . Most were immigrants or children ofimmigrants. As spring approached, European-born Leo and Lillian Halper of fictional Brookville, who for many years had been year-round Sullivan County residents, made an annual trip into New York City. "They had to hire waiters, bus boys, a band and other help."l Not caring for New York City's parking problems, they took the bus, watching the scenery and talking to the bus driver, a country neighbor. Their trip combined business with family obligation. They reminisced about visiting relatives on the Lower East Side: "Leo's sister Bella lived on Norfolk Street. She was a big fat woman who had owned, in former years, a pushcart on nearby Orchard Street." Now she had moved to Borough Park in Brooldyn.2 The Halpers saw their world changing; they saw the world ofthe ever more Americanized Jews changing. When they visited old friends, the Toozens, who had lived on the Lower East Side, they slept on the floor. In postwar America, their friends moved to a new house on Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx and "were proud oftheir spacious house, the modern kitchen, large clos- BORSCHT BELT BUNGALOWS ets and a garage for the car."3 These people and others always showed up at Brookville in the summer. At the very real Richman's, we had a constant stream of friends and relatives who "stopped in" for a few days or weeks. They were welcome before or J 6 after the season, but were barely tolerated during our busy time when they had to sleep on a couch, if they were lucky. A long-time summer drop-in was Grandpa's Turkish bath buddy Abram. A giant ofa man, with a prodigious capacity for liquor and one eye that wandered as he talked, Abram was a parshak) or masseur, at the Turkish baths that my grandfather and his cronies frequented in Brooklyn. Perennially fighting with his wife, in summers Abram would often take refuge at Richman's-in later years sleeping in a bed in the loft over the garage. One of his summer activities was making new bezims (brushes), which he used in scrubbing down his clients. These were made by gathering vast amounts of heavily leaved, straight, white oak twigs. About a hundred of these were tightly bound together with string and hung upside down to dry. When mostly dry, but still pliable, the bezims were ready to be used. They were soaked in soapy water to soften and then used to scrub you down. I was once given the treatment and found more pain than pleasure. Curiously , in a 1991 issue of Le Figaro) a French newspaper, I was reading an article about Tzarist Russia, and there was a photograph of a parshak using a bezim on a St. Petersburgh aristocrat.4 Typical ofthe nonagricultural farmer ofthe resort business was rotund, genial Meyer Furman, one of the three Furman brothers who had bungalow colonies in Woodbourne. A teenager, Brian Lazarus, profiled him in Meyer Furman )s Camp Neversink Weekly Camper: Meyer was born in Dorakoe, Romania, on Oct. 28, 1895. Soon after, he moved to Braella, Romania. At the age of six he went to school for six months. He left to work in a grocery store. He soon left his job, and until the age of eleven he worked as a tinsmith assistant. He came to America in 1907. His first job here was in the fruit business . Later he went into plumbing, but soon after he returned to the fruit business. He met Stella and six months later, on Aug. 1, 1917, they were married. A few months later he went into the Army. When he was discharged in 1919 he weighed 98 pounds. After this he bought an Army and Navy store. In 1936 he first came to Woodbourne. He liked it so much that three years later he bought some land and a house here. In 1946 he put up eight bungalows. Meyer now has over 200 acres ofland. He is the proud father of four children and he has three grandchildren. Last week Meyer and...