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Grandma
Grandma Levine was a formidable woman.
It seemed to me, as a small child, that she spoke to me from a great height; never bending over, but rather straightening her rigid spine even more. She was not unkind, just distant; never showing any sign of affection.
“I’m sure she loves you,” my Aunt Mabel told me, when I asked her why Grandma didn’t like me, “but, maybe, she doesn’t have patience for children anymore.”
After leaving Russia in the late 1890s to escape the pogroms that terrorized the Jews of that country, Grandma met and married David Levine, also a recent Russian immigrant. The young couple didn’t find the legendary streets of gold in America, but they managed to raise their growing family in their crowded Brooklyn, New York home. Grandma gave birth to 12 children, nine of whom survived infancy. Somehow, on Grandpa’s meager earnings as a tailor, she had housed, fed and clothed her large brood in the modest, rented apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn. Cutting every corner possible, she scrupulously saved her money, and bought a one-family house on Blake Avenue, next to a synagogue.
Elated with her venture in real estate, she decided to expand, and announced to Grandpa one day in 1920, “David, we’re moving to the country!” She had acquired a neglected hotel in the Catskills Mountains, with twenty-five rooms and five bathrooms. “I’m going to be like Jenny Grossinger,” she declared, “we’re making a new hotel! Of course, we’ll have to start it out as a boarding house at the beginning. The children are old enough now to help with the chores.”
Grandpa was a quiet man, completely in awe of his enterprising, energetic wife. He smiled and swallowed his objections. Sarah always knows what’s best, he thought, I’ll leave it to her.
Deep in a valley, surrounded by hills, an inn had been constructed in the early 1800s on ten acres of a large tract of land in Mountaindale, and the inn’s owner built a home for his family on the remaining eighty acres across the road.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the new owner of the property sold the inn with its ten surrounding acres,
retaining the house across the way, with its major share of the land, for himself. By the time Grandma Sarah bought the inn, it had become a hotel which had seen better days. The structure had what must have been fine parquet floors, but they had not been well maintained. A stairway of solid oak, with a wide mahogany banister, graced the front hall. A filigree-framed mirror hung above a large fireplace, with an impressive marble mantle. But the hotel needed a lot of work.
That summer, the boys made repairs and painted the house yellow with green shutters, while the girls scrubbed all the rooms, including the enormous kitchen.
This was equipped with a tremendous black stove and sink, and two giant iceboxes, that Grandma had bought from a bankrupt restaurant, stored the perishable food.
She furnished the house with used furniture purchased at auctions, and Grandpa re-upholstered dilapidated sofas for the large parlor, and sewed ruffled curtains for all the rooms. A player piano, fitted out with dozens of music rolls, provided entertainment. Finally, the house was ready for guests. The second oldest daughter, Edna, who considered herself quite sophisticated, using her fractured French whenever possible, said, “Let’s call our hotel ‘The Monte Valle’.” Her brothers snickered, and her sisters rolled their eyes, but surprisingly, her mother gave a rare smile. “I like that - it’s classy. The Monte Valle it is!”
Word of mouth in their old neighborhood spread the news that Sarah Levine owned a new boarding house in the mountains. Knowing what a wonderful cook Sarah was, dozens of Brooklyn families began renting rooms for the summer. The Levine children soon found themselves sleeping in the large attic.
During the week, meals were served only to wives and children, but on Friday nights all the husbands drove up to escape the city heat for the weekend. The guests laughingly called it ‘the bull-run’.
The older children helped Grandma shop, cook, and serve meals to the guests. The kitchen became hot and steamy with the aroma of chicken soup and pot roast. With not a hair escaping her graying bun, Grandma ruled the roost, wielding her wooden spoon, sending her children scurrying in all directions. She made her own cottage cheese by souring milk and putting it through cheesecloth to drain. The children were sent to collect huckleberries which grew on bushes up in the hills, so that their mother could make pies. They came home with their pails full, but their lips and tongues were stained blue from tasting the harvest. The aroma of blueberry pies and challahs [braided loaves of bread] from the kitchen made one’s mouth water and stomach rumble with hunger.
The Levine family, or rather, Grandma, decided that it would be good for the children to stay through the year in the country atmosphere. They spent three winters there.
Water was drawn from seven sparkling streams in the hills. A cow, which the older children took turns milking, grazed in the pasture beyond the house, while the younger kids looked after the chicken coop.
“Mama, I was so scared,” ten-year-old Pearl cried, “I went to feed the chickens, and they all ran right at me! I just threw the chicken feed at them and ran home.”
“Don’t be scared of them, Pearlie,” her mother soothed, “they were just anxious for their food. You can collect eggs tomorrow morning, before the chickens are fed, when the hens are calm and quiet.”
The children attended the one-room schoolhouse, which kept grades one through four on one side of the room, and five through eight on the other. They walked down a dirt path to the small village, which contained a kosher butcher shop, a grocery store, a small dry goods establishment, and the post office. The Ontario and Western Railroad ran through the village, going to Oswego, north in the morning, and south in the evening. Frank, the stationmaster, who had little to do, shooed the children away from the tracks, even though the train ran so seldom.
In time, a pool and a tennis court were built at the ‘Monte Valle’. White painted four-seater swings were set out on the raised lawn opposite the house. Sarah’s daughters sold lemonade, candies and pretzels from a stand on the property, while her sons chopped wood, mowed lawns, and built a gazebo. Grandma’s dream was to turn the renovated house into a fancy resort, but it was never realized. Without a lake, and with only ten acres of land, much of it wooded, rentals had to be much lower than resorts with greatly enhanced facilities.
“I guess Jenny Grossinger is not worried about any competition from me,” Grandma remarked resignedly. Grossingers had already become a famous resort, offering top-notch entertainment as well as excellent food, drawing guests from far and near.
* * *
Ten years later, Grandpa had passed away, and the Levine youngsters had grown up. Some of them had married, and began to start their own families. My father, Harry, Sarah’s fifth child, married Berdie, a guest at the hotel, and the young couple started their family with me. In the midst of the depression, Grandma continued to offer summer rentals in the Catskills. Even in those hard times, enough families somehow managed to raise the necessary money to escape the hot city summers.
Changing the establishment to a ‘cuchalein’ [a Yiddish expression, meaning to cook alone], the large country kitchen now housed small individual ice boxes and stoves, where each wife prepared meals for her own family. This freed my grandmother from her most strenuous labors.
The eldest Levine daughter, Bertha, had married a widower with a six-year-old daughter. They now lived on the premises and helped run the establishment. Morris was an itinerant photographer who took his camera equipment to Florida in the winters.
Morris’ daughter, Rosie, now 16, sold milk and other necessities to guests from a trailer, which also housed the small family, sparing guests the need to walk a half mile down the dusty dirt paths daily, to shop in the village. Of course, the service was also making a profit for Grandma. When the summer season was over, Morris took his family, which now included young Stanley, to Florida in the trailer.
All I remember of my summer visit to Mountaindale, as a three-year-old without my parents, was walking down the path to the village with my aunt Mabel, constantly wiping the dust from my Mary Janes. At seventeen, Mabel was the youngest of the Levines, and she seemed to enjoy taking care of me. I was so proud of those shiny patent leather shoes, with a strap across the instep.
Real big girl shoes, I thought. But, maybe, my memory was triggered by a letter from Aunt Mabel, that I found among my mother’s papers many years later, when Mom died. My aunt had written to her about the incident, and enclosed a picture of the Monte Valle that I had drawn.
I spent some time at the Monte Valle over the years, but I vividly remember my visit there with my mother and two younger brothers when I was thirteen. I was madly infatuated with a nineteen-year-old guest, who returned my interest enthusiastically, until he found out that I was only thirteen. I was very mature looking for my age.
That was a terrible summer for my mother and brothers. Both boys came down with chicken pox shortly after we arrived. Mom kept them confined to their room, and nursed them back to health, while keeping their illness secret. There would have been a mass exodus had any of the other guests found out. Fortunately, no one else contracted the disease, and two happy little boys came out of their prison after a few weeks, with no one the wiser. My mother was a hero to the rest of the Levines.
The Monte Valle remained in the family for many years, but Grandma retired and moved into a Bronx apartment with Teddy, her last remaining single daughter, when she was seventy. We lived a short trolley ride away. My feisty, active grandmother, finding retirement too dull, determined that it was time she learned to read and write in English! So, at 72, she returned to school. We had lots of books at our house, since my mother’s brother, Max, worked for a publisher, and my uncle knew I was a voracious reader. Grandma took the trolley every few weeks to visit us and borrow a shopping bag full of books. When she returned them, she discussed each one of them with me at length.
At the age of sixteen I had finally developed a relationship with my formidable grandmother.
- Norma Grubman
New York, NY, U.S.A.
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