In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (17 page)

The music of the colony resonated with the sounds of atonal displacement. Everyone spoke with some mangled, confused accent that had been forced on them in America. English learned in a hurry. Verbs and nouns swallowed without time to digest. Some vowels never made it into the vocabulary, abandoned heedlessly at the docks.

Where better should this horde of runaways, of phantoms, have settled in for the summer? Cohen’s was strangely their home. They were safe here—well, as safe as they would ever allow themselves to feel. There was much they could never believe in again. Faith was lost. No god. No humanity. No good places to hide. Cohen’s at least offered a refuge of shared cynicism.

And in doing so, it also tolerated a fair amount of dementia. All that insanity added to the atmospheric diversity of the place, like the cool mountain night air and the morning dew. The refugees could swim in Kiamisha Lake. Do as the ancient Indians: purge the sins, cleanse the soul, dive deep into the belly of the water—where it’s quiet—hoping to silence the stowaway shrieks that had come along for the ride.

Cohen never liked the word
concentration camp
, preferring instead the German
lager
.

“Why a camp, they should call it? Belsen was no camp, no picnic. In America, camp is where you send the children, or where you learn to be a Communist. We shouldn’t call the
lager
a camp.” And then, prideful of the haven he offered, he would add: “You want to know from a camp? This is a camp … right here. My camp! An American camp, not for children, but for the people like us. We don’t march. We play cards all day. We sing, we cry. We look out at the trees. No fences, no wires…. Now, who wants for pinochle?”

Written on the swinging sign at the foot of the stone road, carved into the wood in seductive script, read:

COHEN’S SUMMER COTTAGES
LEISURE MACHT FREI!

“Keep up with me, you’re falling behind,” Rosa said. She was wearing a black polka-dot dress with flowing chiffon lace that floated in the air. Moving smartly between branches and twigs, she cut through the woods like an animal beginning its evening hunt.

“I can’t walk this fast,” a whining voice trailed her brisk pace, “it’s too dark…. I’m tripping over acorns.”

The sky was seared in blackness. A few resilient stars wriggled free of the buried pack. With flashlights, mother and son made their way into the forest. Beams sliced between trees, startling mosquitoes, overexposing fireflies, scattering milky streaks through the bushes.

“We’re going to be late for my game,” she said. “Do you want your mama to miss her bingo game? Think what we could win.”

From behind and stammering: “What can we win?”

“Let’s see …” she ruminated, pointing the flashlight down against her side, a white mist of light dappling the ground. “They have a blender and a seltzer maker. Ida, next door, tells me there is a bagel slicer; you just put the bagel in a plastic cover, and then slice like regular. No more cutting my hand. Such good prizes, no?”

“We’ll never use any of that junk—even if we do win.” The child was not easily tempted by convenience, nor fooled by deceit.

“Don’t argue with me,” she said. “I need to practice for the big game when summer is over—the one at Cohen’s. He offers a cash grand prize.”

“Why do we have to go? Can’t we just stay home tonight? Lucy’s on television.”

Rosa turned around, lifted the flashlight, and planted a perfect moon over her face. In a possessed voice she said, “What do you think puts food on our table?”

“Bingo?”

“Bingo!”

“How does a bagel slicer put food on our table?”

“Every little bit helps.”

“But we went last night….”

“And we go tonight. Tomorrow we will go to Krause’s Colony for a movie at their concession. The Three Stooges are playing. We’ll have bagels, lox, and cream cheese. That you’ll like.”

And with that offer she danced through the woods, waving her arms like a sorceress, skipping around each tree; then she turned swiftly to flash a ray of light on her young son, who by now had resigned himself to the night’s bingo game.

Two years earlier Rosa’s husband had died, suddenly. His heart stopped. Just gave up. They had been two survivors who left much behind in that European graveyard—except death, which must have been lonely, or simply wasn’t yet finished with the family. With Morris’s parting, the task of raising Adam fell to her, alone.

Rosa Posner, fragile, a thin face with full lips, an unforgetting purple scar molded on her forehead, feared being a widow with child in a new land. Like the other refugees, she stumbled over the language. She did not know the secret handshakes that seemed so natural for immigrants who came before the war. And of course there was the concern over money. “
Ach, geld. Ich brauch mehr geld
.” Her money worries never allowed her mind a minute’s rest.

“I know from nothing except how to survive,” she pondered. In the camps she had been a saboteur, a black-market organizer, an underground operator. It took years to relearn the simple etiquette of life among the living. “Who in this country needs to know from such things?”

They lived in a middle-class section of Brooklyn. Ethnics at every corner. Dark walk-up apartment houses. Trees planted at the foot of the curb, in front of some buildings, but not others. It was a borough built mostly of stone and concrete, not entirely in harmony with nature.

One day, joining a card game in Brooklyn, Rosa learned that she had a knack for recalling numbers, and a certain streakiness with luck that seemed to will the royalty of the deck in her direction.

She became a gambler, a regular shark at the neighborhood tables. During the day she worked in a stationery store off Nostrand Avenue—calendars, magazines, fancy pens, newspapers, especially the
Forward
. She knew them all. But at night, off to a neighborhood game for gin rummy or seven-card poker.

For three weeks each year, during the Christmas season running through the first part of January—the peak time for snowbirds—she would take Adam out of school, board a Greyhound bus, and head down to Florida. It was a long bus ride—almost two days. Adam would sleep for most of the time, or stare down at the pages of a book, or color in a large white pad that Rosa had picked up for him at the stationery store. He never complained about the trip. It was all part of his mother’s therapy—he knew it, even then.

Rosa passed the time by staring out the window. She loved the long journey south, chasing the warm weather, anticipating the tropics, breezing through all those unfamiliar towns. “What is this Fayetteville, and Jacksonville? Where are we now?” The motion of the bus rocked her gently, but her eyes never closed as she struggled with all those solicitations posted along the highway. Her lips moved slowly, and then the billboard was gone, already well behind her.

But when the bus reached Miami, Rosa stepped on the warm asphalt on Flagler Street and was immediately reminded of why she had come. There was the dog track on First Street on Miami Beach. And jai alai in Miami. The hotels along Collins Avenue were filled with “pigeons,” as she called them—a phrase picked up from late-night movies, the source of much of her English.

“Now you stay in this room until I get back,” she said, her son lying in bed in his pajamas, shadows from the black-and-white TV flickering off the window. Jackie Gleason droned in the background. “If you need anything, I’ll be at the Caribbean Hotel, down the street. I’ll come back with lots of money tonight. We’ll be rich like Rockefellers. Tomorrow, I’ll buy you a stuffed alligator in the souvenir store downstairs, maybe even a painted coconut. Now go to sleep.”

In the country, during the summer, the games were fewer, and the stakes lower. But there was bingo, the calling of the numbers—B23, A14, G9—which serenaded her through each night.

At the top of a road littered with pinecones the forest came to a halt. There was a light that led down to a barn, a long trailerlike edifice where the whole colony gathered for bingo. Once inside, Rosa purchased eight cards.

“You play so many cards, Mrs. Posner,” the man at the concession observed. “How do you keep up with all of them?”

“I brought my little helper,” she replied.

The room was filled mostly with people from the colony, but there were a few, like Rosa and Adam, who traveled from neighboring villages, playing bingo wherever it could be found. Each colony offered a game a week. For some, that was more than enough.

“You’ll play these two, Adam, and I’ll play the rest.”

They took their seats at a long wooden table with an adjoining bench, and set the cards out in front of them.

“Oh, I like these,” Rosa said, uncorking a Magic Marker that had a round sponge for a head. “You see, you just push the marker down on the card like this. Watch me, you don’t want to mark the wrong number.”

A giant cage filled with wooden balls readied itself for the caller’s rumbling spin.

“Our first prize is the bagel slicer,” the caller said. “To win you got to have an L in any direction.” He let go of the crank. The balls came to a crackling halt. He then opened the cage and released the first of the night’s numbers.

“B seven!”

“We got one,” Adam said, patting the card with his marker, his small face alternately glowing and serious. “We live in bungalow seven—that’s why they called it.”

Rosa smiled down at her son but remained earnest in her own vigil. As the numbers dropped from the cage, Rosa was busy blotting her card, checking up and down the rows, hands moving methodically like a spirited conductor.

Several games passed and Rosa gathered her fortune: the bagel slicer, the blender, a summer umbrella, a walking cane, a straw hat, two ashtrays—one made into the shape of a flamingo, the other a fish.

Someone in the front row screamed “Fix!” which drew a wave a laughter from the good-natured folk.

“Who is that lady back there?”

“Check her cards! Read me back her numbers again, will yah?”

“Go back to your own bungalow colony, lady!”

Rosa smiled shyly, but paid little mind to their teasings. With each call of the numbers, her eyes—fixed and hypnotic—would light up like the brightest of moons. Adam concentrated on the pageantry of his mother’s luck, the lettering on her forearm raced by him, the branded marks blurred in streaks before his eyes.

His attention faltered. A disapproving Rosa leaned over and blotted in a few of the numbers that her son had missed. “Adam, you are not watching. I cannot depend on you.” He, meanwhile, checked his cards once more, trying to see if the hand dealt his mother—the one on her forearm—in any way equaled a winning card. Chasing her movements, he grew sleepy. All that kept him awake was the sound of his mother’s calming refrain, the lullaby of his summers:

“Bingo!”

“Bingo!”

“Bingo!”

As the night wore on, Adam dropped off to sleep, stretched out over the bench, beside Rosa. A half-eaten hamburger remained at the table. His cards failed him. So did his stamina. “Bingo!” unaccountably soothed his slumber.

Years earlier, just a few months before Morris’s death, a five iron glistened in the sun. Artie was lofting golf balls out into the open blue sky. A scuff of grass, burnished on the blade, mixed with the first moisture of the day. The flight of the ball came into view against the tall green trees that surrounded the colony. On the other side of the forest were other crazies, with their own accents.