In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" Read Free

alarming rate.
    That’s why the Royal’s survival is so spectacular. I “found” it in 1993, on my first field trip to the Catskills, after having stayed away since 1979. Like many others who worked hard in the Catskills or who tired of the culture, I fled after finishing college. It took many years to integrate into my adult life the ambivalence that I had always experienced there. I had been uprooted every year in May from school and friends to go there and live with my parents in cramped rooms. I watched my parents work extremely hard each summer, three months’ labor with not a single day off. We never had our own summer vacation, but only served other people on theirs. Also, like many others, I fled from the strong Jewish culture of the area, not knowing until recently how to make sense of it.
    I say that I “found” the Royal because my parents, until they died—my father in 1972, my mother in 1991—hid from me their failed venture into the hotel business. Certainly, they had told me that they once had a hotel, when I was born. They even showed me some photos of us there. But they said the hotel was “gone.” Surely they knew it still stood, in various reincarnations, including a seedy rooming house, since they worked the Catskills their whole lives and knew an enormous number of people and places there. My father died working in his coffee shop concession at Chaits Hotel in Accord, and my mother remained cooking there till 1979. For many of their years working in Swan Lake, they drove right past White Lake en route to Monticello. My father often worked for Dependable Employment Agency, driving new hires all over the Mountains, so he would undoubtedly have passed it many times. And nowhere was that far that they couldn’t have shown me their old hotel, especially since I often asked. All I ever got was, “It’s gone,” even when we spent several weeks in May on the Kauneonga side of White Lake at our friends George and Miriam Shapiro’s bungalow colony while my parents looked for work.
    When my mother died, I found among her few papers a postcard of the hotel, the only memento apart from a few photos. I knew that somehow I would discover what I expected to be the remnants of Brown’s Hotel Royal. The postcard would be my magic key and treasure map, even if I only located foundation stones. But I was shocked to see an operating hotel, the Bradstan, that was so clearly the Royal. It lacked the symmetrical side rooms that had once framed the front porch, a common Catskills architectural detail (they had been torn down due to deterioration). And its white clapboards were not the old stucco facade. But the whole shape was there, comfortably nestled on Route 17-B across from the most beautiful lake in the Mountains.
    Each year since 1993 I have visited the hotel for one reason or another. One year I brought a New York Times reporter who wrote a story on me and the History of the Catskills Conference. Another year I came to collect an old menu, handwritten by my mother in 1950, that owners Ed Samuelson and Scott Dudek had turned up. Once I brought my wife and children to see the place where I lived as a baby and toddler. A year after that I went to pick up a box of old dishes from the hotel’s past. I kept thinking, “I should stay here as a guest once.” So I did!
    Who slept in this room fifty years ago? Actually, the question is who slept in each half of this room, for two small rooms had since been made into a single larger one. Was it one of my aunts, uncles, cousins—the many family members who often stayed and/or worked here? Max, Laura, Gloria, Bess, Nat, Gene, Eugene, Sylvia, Sylvia, and Sylvia (so common a name then)—did you fall asleep here, across from White Lake shimmering in the August moonlight? Did you enjoy summer here in the Catskills, swim in the lake, play poker at night, hear my cousin Gene play violin, drink schnapps?
    I would have been conceived here at the Royal if my parents were