In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (45 page)

Son of a bitch.

Hara The Great worked to regain his moment. He gazed into Ernie Pincus’ eyes waving his arms. Ernie Pincus stiffened and went into a trance.

“You are a rock, a board, a piece of steel, the Brooklyn Bridge,” Hara said.

Ernie Pincus agreed. He was totally rigid.

“I need assistance,” Hara said.

Wilbur and Buddy Schneitzel came to the stage. The waiters helped lift Ernie’s body onto the backs of the separated chairs. One chair held shoulders, the second chair held legs. Underneath was only air.

“Who will be first to cross this human span?” Hara said.

He started small. Charlie Mandel volunteered by reflex. He was lifted onto Ernie Pincus’ knotted stomach and balanced up there.

Charlie was joined by Aaron Bunyik, a hefty guest. The final amazement came when Zalik Boulak climbed aboard with Leslie Quint. Charlie, Aaron, Zalik and Leslie stood on Ernie Pincus, who didn’t seem to mind.

The Willow Spring casino cheered for a minute.

“Don’t hurt him,” Ida Berman yelled. “You’ll rupture his spleen.”

“Fear not,” Hara said. “He feels no pain or anguish. The power of Hara The Great has transformed this man to a hunk of cement.”

“It’s on you,” Ida Berman said. “I’m not responsible.”

Vinnie Berman watched Hara The Great from in back where she sat with her family. He made her jumpy. She held two fingers in front of her eyes. It was a trick she learned in the movies. When the thing that scared you fit between your two fingers you could pretend to put it in your pocket like a doll.

Hara The Great and Vinnie Berman had talked before the show. He had a gentle manner and a commanding way. He was working for college money. He wanted to be a veterinarian. He loved animals. Magic was only his hobby turned to profit through his clever head. He got Ernie Pincus through a magic store in Times Square. Ernie was a susceptible, pre-hypnotized. Hara turned him on and off with a certain noise he made with his mouth. The hand waving was hocus-pocus. While they talked he turned Ernie off to show Vinnie. When Ernie was off Hara The Great gave Vinnie Berman a quick kiss on the nose. Some character.

Now Ernie Pincus, restored to normal, took bows, standing with the guests who walked over him.

“No harm done,” Hara The Great told the casino.

Between Happy And Tappy, Hara and Ernie the Saturday special was a hit. With Bunny Bernice on Friday and this on Saturday there could be no complaints about Willow Spring’s entertainment.

The band played “Star Dust” while the curtain closed and benches were moved to the walls. While dancing commenced, Harry Craft rushed to his concession. Orders poured in.

The first dancers were Arnie and Sandy Berman. Cute.

Leslie Quint dragged Marvin Katz to the floor and made him try the rumba. Phil and Fay Katz watched their son Marvin struggle with the
shiksa
with beaming faces.

Zalik Boulak took both his daughters, Eve and Lila, to the floor.

Inside a small circle made up of the Schneitzel twins, the Rifkins and the immediate family, Vinnie Berman danced with herself. From outside the circle Barry Guerfin felt a pull at his genitals. Watching Vinnie move gave him terrific sensations.

The honeymooning Blitzes did a fox-trot, holding close.

Howard Moskol danced with Manya, counting to himself the way he learned it from Arthur Murray. Manya’s ears burned. Her number-two lover was in the room. She could feel him watching and thinking shitty thoughts. She could feel his mind grabbing her ass.

Hara The Great and Ernie Pincus left for their next performance at the Elsmere Arms, but not until Vinnie Berman had agreed to a meeting later in the week.

Everybody danced.

The Fine Art of Mountain
Tummling

Joyce Wadler

T
his is what it was like, in the Borscht Belt, from a survivor: full of noise, full of Jews, and the jokes grew on trees.

You have perhaps in some long-ago supper club seen Myron Cohen; you think perhaps this is the way it was, five dozen over-the-hill comics wandering around the Catskills shouting, “Cut velvet!” But this was only part of the mountains, rich and lunatic and green.

“The mountains”: a collection of wood frame boardinghouses and farmhouses, already collapsing when acquired, with names like the Palace and Paradise and Little Budapest and more often than not a cow on the lawn and some chickens in the back. “The season”: that period from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend—for the hotels are never heated—during which the guests arrive and the family, if business is good, gives up its own rooms and pitches a tent on the front lawn. “The lemosene”: an ancient vehicle—usually an Oldsmobile, with the name of the hotel painted on the side—that goes to the train station to pick up the guests. “The casino”: the dining room, after dinner, when the tables have been pulled away to make room for a show.

The jokes. All over. Yes, really all over. You do not now believe it, but such was the surreal and marvelous nature of the mountains, of the extraordinary combination of Jewish refugees in the American mountains, that everyone, from the busboys in the kitchen to the ladies around the pool, had the timing of Benny, the delivery of Berle.

“Her mink coat don’t keep me warm,” sings Gussie Aronowitz, in the bakery shop in Fleischmanns.

“What you knowed in your whole life about garments, I already forgot,” an old lady actually says at the Lebowitz Pine View in Fallsburg.

Or maybe she does not.

There are no footlights, you see, separating the amateurs from the professionals in the green Jewish mountains.

In the mountains, it will always be difficult to tell the players from the fans.

Which reminds me, in case there is someone who
doesn’t
know the “Cut velvet” joke: Business is going bad at the factory of Schwartz and Ziegel. It gets so bad, Schwartz finally can’t stand it. He goes to the window. He jumps. On the way down, he passes the shop of his archrival, Fierstein: hundreds and hundreds of racks of dresses. Schwartz checks out the fabric. Then, with the last words he’ll ever speak, he hollers up to his partner.

“Cuuuuuut veeeelvet!”

How do you like your definitions, by the way, geography or state of mind? Geography puts the Borscht Belt three hours out of New York City, in Sullivan and Ulster counties. State of mind could put the Borscht Belt, or Borscht Belt humor, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, or in pockets of Lakewood, New Jersey, in the Thirties, or in Miami Beach in the Fifties. Though of course if you wanted to get to the root of Borscht Belt, you would dateline it Minsk.

Minsk, Feb. 23—Rabbi, give us a prayer for the czar
.

Rabbi: Keep the czar well … and far away from us
.

Time? Maybe the turn of the century. A hilarious time for the Jewish people. My own great-grandfather, for instance, takes medicine to make him sick to keep him out of the Russian army. He dies from the medicine, but not in vain, giving me, four generations later, the material to make him the punch line of a Jewish joke. My father’s father, a tailor, comes to America and buys a share in a boardinghouse in the Catskills so he can enjoy the country air. He enjoys it for approximately twenty years before being clobbered to death by a falling tree, thus making his own contribution to Jewish humor: the absurdity of Jews in nature, which you see running so often through Woody Allen’s work. Nonetheless, by this time my grandfather is part of a trend. The Catskills are scattered with boardinghouses. Grossinger’s, in 1914, begins as a seven-room farmhouse, with cow. By 1942 in Sullivan and Ulster counties alone there are literally hundreds of small boardinghouses, and more than five hundred of them use entertainers—even if it’s only once a week.

They called them
tummlers
, Yiddish for “noise” or “merrymaker,” and what they liked to pay them, in the late Thirties, early Forties, was room and board, and maybe fifteen dollars a week. What the guests generally paid in a boardinghouse was perhaps twenty or twenty-five dollars weekly, all you could eat. They would lie around the pool, with maple leaves on their noses, and in the afternoon they gathered on the lawn to wait for the social director—who in the case of our establishment, the Maplewood House, was cousin Bernie, an English teacher from the city—to give them cha-cha lessons on the porch. Wood frame boardinghouses around them; the shadow of Hitler behind them; but everybody on the floor when the social director hollers, “CHA-CHA-CHA!”

You ask me my memories of the Borscht Belt. I can tell you, again, the first thing is noise. Noise at canasta; noise in the dining room; noise (this is only theory) at the astonishment and joy of being alive. They dried the silverware in the kitchen by putting it in pillowcases and shaking it, to give you an idea.

The second thing—it cannot be repeated often enough, and repetition is the signature of the worrisome Jewish soul—it was funny in the mountains. The bosses yelling at the help were funny. The busboys spitting in the soup were funny. The social directors chasing the weekday widows were funny. Morris the goddamn
butcher
was funny. You want to know the essential spirit of the Borscht Belt, I give you Morris the Butcher, philosopher and refugee, who never saw the stage.

Morris the Butcher on life: “Anyone can sell a steak. To move hamburger, that’s something.”

Morris the Butcher on the hotel owner who sent back an order of eight dozen eggs because they were green: “When business is slow, they got time to look at the eggs
.”

What the crowd in the mountains really liked, by the way, was comics throwing themselves, fully clothed, into the pool. Once, after bombing at the Nevele, Jan Murray warmed up the crowd during the day by sliding down the hill on his
tuchis
, and that night, sure enough, he knocks ’em dead.

What can you say—it was very broad humor. Jerry Lewis in the main dining room pouring soup on his head to get a few laughs. Buddy Hackett, doubling as a busboy and comic, scratching his ass through supper all week to provide the setup for one lousy joke.
(Waiter, in front of the guests: “Busboy, I noticed you been standing with your hand on your ass all week. Do you have hemorrhoids?” Hackett: “We only have what’s on the menu.”)
Crude stuff, rough stuff. Humor of the working class.

Also—and this is perhaps why so many people these days turn away from it, want to make you believe they were never a part of it—it wasn’t just crude humor, it was Jew Humor. Shtetl Humor. Unassimilated Humor. Them-and-Us kind of humor. Humor that made fun of the affectations of Jews trying desperately to become part of the middle class. Humor that pointed out the barriers between Jew and Gentile rather than making believe they did not exist. Humor that not only addressed itself to the Jewish long view of the universe (briefly put: Always keep one eye on the exit) but also dealt with areas that some Jews did not want to look at: aggression and self-hatred and overstriving and pain.

Jewish man gets a boat, gets the outfit, gets the captain’s hat, takes his mother out for a spin. “So, Ma,” he says. “Whattaya think of the captain?” His mother checks him out. “Son,” she says, “by me you’re a captain. By your father you’re a captain. But by a captain, you’re no captain.”