You were in the Borscht Belt during its golden age.
I was born in the old Monticello Hospital on Pesach in 1951, so yes. The place was hopping in the 1950s, and I remember it well. There was no way you could ever say to someone, “I can’t get a job,” because every hotel needed all kinds of employees. If you were fired by one hotel, you just went to the next one and got another job. That’s how much activity there was up here—and that was year round, not only in the summer. My cousins were city kids, and my grandfather would tell me, “Allen, you’re the lucky one.” But I didn’t fully understand that until I got a little older. In my later years, I definitely appreciated that my parents had chosen to live here.
I believe that they met in the Catskills because both sets of parents lived there.
Yes. Everyone arrived in the mountains in the late 1930s. My father’s parents came from Poland, but they got married in America. My mother’s parents, the Sadownicks, came from Russia and settled in Glen Spey because it reminded my grandfather of the Old Country. The problem was that he couldn’t even tell people he was Jewish because the area was very anti-Semitic. So instead of using his full name, Irving Sadownick, he would tell people that his name was Mr. Irving, which I thought was a Jewish name. Apparently, he got away with it until he came back from World War II, when everyone found out he was Jewish because they put up a plaque with his full name on it in the local town hall. After that the locals got really nasty, including contaminating his well and other things, so that’s when he moved to the big city—Monticello.
What about your father’s father?
His name was Sam Frishman. Both of my grandfathers were resourceful because they had to be. My father’s father had a connection with someone named Mr. Berman, who had connections with people in the city, and he had connections with the big machers when they were building Rockefeller Center. This was during the war, and my father asked Mr. Berman if he could get him nails because he was trying to build some bungalows. Nails were scarce in those years because they needed all the metal for bullets. Mr. Berman said, “Come down to the city with your truck and I’ll help you out.”
My grandfather walks into his office wearing his overalls—he didn’t know what was going on—and it was a big meeting with all of the top people. They were all wearing suits. Mr. Berman says, “This is my friend Sam Frishman. He needs nails and supplies to build bungalows. Can you help him?”
In those days, nails used to come in wooden kegs, so they would give him a keg of regular nails and two kegs of bent nails, which they would then straighten out. For years, whenever I went down to the basement of my grandfather’s place, there were still cans and cans of bent nails. I couldn’t figure out why there were so many; after all, Grandpa was a good carpenter. Years later, my father explained that these were the leftover nails from Rockefeller Center.
Aside from being lucky enough to have connections, he was also very smart. He owned almost 80 acres of land, and he would have a logger come and cut down the trees and give him some wood after it was sawmilled. He would then air-dry the lumber and have a stack of it so he could build more bungalows. He didn’t have money to buy the wood. Both my grandfathers were very resourceful.
You said that your maternal grandfather didn’t want to reveal that he was Jewish because of anti-Semitism. When did the Catskills start “converting” from Christianity to Judaism?
It started in the late teens and the ’20s. By then, more and more Jews were coming up, and they were able to buy these old farms that had a big farmhouse. They would convert some of the rooms and they had a bathroom, or they had a bathroom down the hall. Some of those places became large hotels while others became bungalow colonies. That was how the Catskills developed.
Were the hotels simply catering to the Jews, or were they owned by Jews as well?
At that point, all of the hotels that catered to the Jews had Jewish owners. The non-Jews didn’t want any Jews up here, so even if they owned a hotel, they didn’t want Jews to stay there. My father told me that the entire farm they bought back in 1941 cost only around $700 or $800. Today that’s bupkes, but back then it was a lot of money. He borrowed $10 from this cousin and maybe $50 from a good friend to scrape enough money together for a down payment. Life itself was easier in the Catskills, and the people who worked in the hotels, bungalow colonies and day camps had the time of their lives. The Jews knew that they could come up here to escape without being ostracized. That was a process in and of itself, because at first there would be signs that said, “No dogs, no Jews and no consumptives.”
To read more, subscribe to Ami
Recent Comments