Summer on a Mountain of Spices

SUMMER ON A MOUNTAIN OF SPICES

by

HARVEY JACOBS

Produced by ReAnimus Press

Other books by Harvey Jacobs:

Beautiful Soup

Side Effects

American Goliath

The Egg of the Glak

The Juror

But Wait.... There's More! #1

But Wait.... There's More! #2

But Wait.... There's More! #3

© 2017, 1975 by Harvey Jacobs. All rights reserved.

http://ReAnimus.com/store?author=harveyjacobs

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~~~

For Estelle and Adam

~~~

Table of Contents

Introduction

I.

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

II.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

III.

A GLOSSARY OF CATSKILL YIDDISH

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Author

The Kattsberg, or Catskill Mountains, have always been a region full of fable. The Indians considered them the abode of spirits...

The Sketch Book

—Washington Irving

Introduction

Summer on a Mountain of Spices (the title derives from the Song of Solomon) is a novel, i.e. a fiction, based on life at The Spring Lake House, a small family hotel, in the summer of 1945 during the last week of World War II. Spring Lake was a mile from Monticello, the summit of the Jewish Alps. It catered to refugees from the garment center and an occasional professional (a lawyer, a dentist) escaping Manhattan’s brutal heat for a few weeks and allowing wives and children the chance to breathe some fresh air, feast on incredible Jewish dishes and polish skills at tennis, baseball, swimming, Mah Jong, Poker, Pinochle, even dancing to a four-piece band in the casino."

Guests at the modest hotel (financial mosquitoes compared with the wealthy at enclaves like Grossinger’s and The Concord where, my father would say, people walk on cement, not grass) still considered themselves superior to families that rented bungalows in colonies we called kuchalains where you had to do your own cooking and cleaning.

Spring Lake was owned and operated by my aunts and uncles. My summer job, at age fifteen, was running the concession under a banner that read WHY STARVE? YELL HARV! that sold cigarettes, cigars, sodas from the Nu Icy bottling plant, candy bars and other essentials of the good life.

That summer I was hammered by three gigantic events: I had discovered girls and browsed the mysteries of sex. News of the unthinkable horror of the Holocaust was revealed in the press and on radio. The furious dawn of the atomic age not only signaled the end of the war but possibly the world. Those huge revelations took root beside my own self-centered, selfish fantasies about my future. In 1973, when I wrote the novel, I still squirmed over the inner swirl of that long-ago summer.

Despite the bloody tally of the war and the crushing acceptance of the Holocaust, I wanted my own turn at life and I told my story like it was, a mix of pain and humor, the amalgam that’s part of every Jew’s heartbeat (and maybe everybody else’s too.)

Curiously, as I recall, while there was the sense of impending elation over victory on the battlefields, there was hardly any talk about the Holocaust. Perhaps the subject was too overwhelming and the sense of survivor’s guilt too strong. We were forced to face the truth that if it hadn’t been for the courage of parents and grandparents who came to America with no money, no language, nothing much but hope, we would all be ashes blowing through history. There was conflict between celebration and mourning.

I wondered, and still do, why we previously heard nothing of the final solution since the truth about the death camps was known by many, including President Roosevelt who we all adored. Where were the cries of rage? Were my parents ignorant of the horrors that allowed for an Auschwitz or had they purposely kept those facts from the children? In those days, Jews were careful not to attract too much attention to themselves, even in America. Their own sons were fighting and dying, but anti-Semitism was a frightening fact of life.

When I wrote Summer my object was to preserve the events and emotions I’d experienced some thirty-five years earlier. I thought members of my family who were still alive (both of my parents had died by then) would be pleased at the attempt to preserve our legacy of memory. The novel is fiction but family members looked for characters that were closely based on themselves and revealed too many of their little foibles and secrets. Many were outraged instead of pleased at what I thought was a warm, loving and funny memorial.

The critical reception was very positive and resulted in a Broadway and film option which, alas, never came to anything. In any case, my memory of a long-ago summer is alive and well.

Others, with different memories, like Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis, and Alan King (who also optioned my novel and was working on a script which had the young narrator end up in the oval office as the first Jewish President... Hollywood does have a way of seeing things) and films like Walk on the Moon produced by Dustin Hoffman have helped stir curiosity about climbing The Jewish Alps.

Summer on a Mountain of Spices is about discovery, love, tears, sacrifice, and honoring the past while laughing at our clumsy attempts at grace and the fun of watching us all trip on the banana peel we call reality on the summertime voyage from somewhere to somewhere before the snow falls.

—Harvey Jacobs

I.

Rain Is Liquid Sleep

Friday

1.

In the year 1942, Harry Craft reported his mother for hoarding cans of Bumble Bee salmon. It was on a day in the first spring of the young war. The lady who heard his report sat in the decorated gym of P.S. 63 in Manhattan. She was taking applications for ration books.

Harry Craft’s mother, Betty Craft, began laughing. The ration book lady laughed too since only five cans of Bumble Bee were involved. Still, she tore stamps from the Craft book.

The story of how Harry made his mother declare her cans to the last can became a family classic. It was told and retold as example of Harry’s seriousness, deep-rooted honesty and patriotism. Fear was never mentioned, though it was the major part of Harry’s motivation.

The same Harry Craft gave his lead soldiers to the neighborhood scrap drive. He sacrificed an expensive army, navy and air force to the effort.

Assuming that his father, Dr. Lawrence Craft, oral surgeon, was wrong and the collector didn’t take them home for his own kids, they had long since been melted into bullets that flew in Europe and Asia. Harry often speculated on the fate of those bullets. Did they find fleshy homes or did they lodge in trees or bounce off rocks or just bury themselves in the earth? If there were only a way to mark such gifts and know their ultimate history.

Now it was the summer of 1945. The war in Europe was over. Pictures were being released of broken cities and Germans with dead eyes, of liberated skeletons and Americans playing with alien children, of diplomats and generals, of smashed armor and piled bones, of flags in the mud, of proud flags flying.

A vast armada waited off the coast of Japan. Each night Tokyo was broiled with fire bombs. The United Nations Charter had been drafted. The victory banners that hung between tenements on most of the Lower East Side streets were torn and blotchy. Some had already been taken down by the wind. The threat of death from the air was gone from the city. Harry Craft’s brother, Hyman Craft, was stationed at Mitchel Field on Long Island, New York. Victory was assured. The Allies toyed with the Empire of the Rising Sun. Banzai.

Sweet suspense.

A sudden fresh energy moved like electric through the purged world. The Lord was praised, the ammunition passed. Bluebirds flew over the white cliffs of Dover. All things were possible and coming to pass.

Millions died in the war’s fire. They had no voices. They lost their faces. Even the face and sound of Dave Lemkin, Hy’s best buddy, killed in France, was sucked back into a mouth of shadows. Harry Craft could think sadly of the dead, but he celebrated the time he was born to, the crisis of battle, the tension of counterattack, the newspaper maps with thick ink arrows tracing the blitz, the eruption of history. Harry Craft liked living on dates they would teach forever in schools not yet built. They jibed with his own throbbing history.

On the night of the Battle of Midway, Harry Craft jerked off for the first time. On the day Hitler died in Berlin he touched his first tit. United nations on the march with flags unfurled. Harry moved too.

The fetal faces of Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen looked out through barbed wire. Harry looked back. Was it his fault that his testicles were full? Was it his fault that he had plans? Was it his fault that the morning was beautiful?

2.

Harry Craft woke at five, dressed, washed in cold water. His father snored in his bed. His mother slept silently.

The snores from his father were short, violent, stumpy. They prowled the apartment. Harry pitied his mother sleeping there in her faded pink nightgown. Dr. Craft’s snores accused, they hunted. How could she sleep through all the years of buzzing?

In the kitchen Harry drank a glass of milk and ate a Drake’s cake. He counted cartons of cigarettes bought on the black market through one of Dr. Craft’s patients. Camels. Luckies. Old Golds. Pall Malls. Kools. Philip Morrises and Regents. They would turn to solid profit at a dollar a pack. Even if the Great War ended that day the tobacco shortage was good for at least the rest of August.

Harry looked out the window down along Avenue A. His Uncle Al Berman was supposed to pick him up at six. If they made time they could get to the Willow Spring Hotel in time for Harry to sell sodas in the dining room.

The weekend was money. Big candy business, assorted shit at a dime apiece. Drinks, same price. Later, Tally-Ho cards and a cut of the kitty. Always the cigarettes.

War or no war, Harry Craft had the goods. The Crafts had friends in New York. The Bermans had connections in Monticello. So, while his friends earned twenty dollars a week as delivery boys, messengers and clerks in the rancid city, Harry Craft, purveyor of delicacies to the Willow Spring Hotel, made twenty in a night. He had cool air to breathe.

Nice.

Al Berman’s Dodge sedan parked on the corner of Fourth Street. Al hit the horn. Harry leaned out the window.

I’m late. Move your ass, said Uncle Al.

Harry pushed the substantial box of cigarettes to the apartment door. He got his carton to the hall and pressed the elevator button. Mrs. Craft came after him, her arms around her breasts. She kissed her son on the head.

Harry, be careful.

I will, Ma.

Make sure Al don’t fall asleep at the wheel. He’s the worst driver in history.

I’ll sing to him.

The elevator came. Mrs. Craft ran back into the apartment before the elevator man saw her undressed.

What you got there? the elevator man said.

Crap for the country.

How much you want for one of those?

I get a buck a pack.

Christ.

In the lobby Harry Craft gave the elevator man a pack of Luckies in exchange for a hand with the box. Al Berman already had his trunk open. It was filled with meat packed in waxed paper. They had to put the cigarettes in the back seat and cover them with a blanket.

You know how I spent last night? Belching, Al Berman said as he started up the Dodge. I ate something.

The car went up the West Side Highway past the pier where the corpse of the great ship Normandie lay on her side. Here again history outside paralleled history inside. On the day the Normandie burned, sabotaged by Nazis, Harry french-kissed a girl from Julia Richman High School.

Al Berman’s car passed transports, destroyers and a carrier. Harry envied the uniformed men on the ships. He missed World War II by three lousy years. Three years more and he could be undressing French girls in Paris after saving Jews in the camps. He could fire point-blank at SS men or hold up a bayonet to catch the weight of suicidal Japs. He could be crouched in an LST off Honshu smoking and cracking jokes about slanted pussy while waiting for the signal to go. Sure as shit he wouldn’t be stuck in Mitchel Field, Long Island. And he wouldn’t be dead.

So, it’ll be over soon, Al Berman said.

You can’t tell with the Nips, Harry said. They could fight inch by inch to the last Jap.

They’ll buckle.

Buckle? Al Berman got that from the Daily News.

On the Washington Bridge Al Berman said, Smell that air. At the toll booth he said, We should make good time.

A few miles later he would say A choleria¹ to the anti-Semites in Bloomingburg and A shvartz yor to the citizens of Tuxedo Park, restricted, guarded by its own soldiers. After Tuxedo Park he would say, We’ll stop at the Red Apple for a piss and a bite. Meanwhile the travelers rolled along sniffing pigs from the pens in Secaucus, New Jersey.

v~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~v

¹See Glossary of Catskill Yiddish in back of the book.

^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^

Uncle Al hummed a tune. Harry Craft dreamed. The summer was practically gone. It was downhill to September. It was a good summer for money but bad for memory. Not much happened. There were still a few weeks.

Harry yawned. His uncle did likewise. With his eyes closed Harry conjured Elaine Fish, his summer girl. For the sake of variety he cast her in the role of the Willow Spring chambermaid. Harry dressed her like a Dixie Dugan doll. He gave her a mop and a pail. Harry saw the transformed Elaine bending with her lollipop ass in the Lysol air. She worked in an empty room. Sheets and pillowcases were on the floor. New linens and towels were stacked on a bare mattress. Elaine saw a wasp land on her breast. She screamed. Too late. Harry, outside the door, came in just as the wasp gave her a sting. She pulled her dress off the shoulder. Out came a nipple.

Harry wriggled in the front seat to hide his budding erection. He looked over at his uncle, who drowsed behind the wheel.

While Al Berman’s head bounced up and down, the Dodge closed fast on the rear of a limousine that waited for a light. Harry grabbed the wheel and spun it while he dived under the dashboard.

Bang.

The crash knocked the front off the Dodge. Glass flew. Metal bent.

Lucky the meat in back was hardly touched and the cigarettes only got squeezed.

The meat in front didn’t do as well. Harry Craft’s meat was jolted but not bruised. Al Berman’s meat was in worse shape. The wheel hit him in the side. It felt bad when he rubbed himself.

3.

Harry Craft and Al Berman stood in the middle of the highway with pieces of car.

A woman from the limousine screamed that she had rectal bleeding. Others in that car, its bumper hardly dented, opened doors and abandoned its massive body. They checked trunks piled on the roof. Nothing was disturbed. Out came two sisters holding hands, a bald man in a blue suit who yelled at the woman with rectal bleeding, a man in white pants and a red jacket who accused Al Berman of murder, and the driver, a boy with a chauffeur’s cap who examined the damage, looked flatly at his passengers, then ran away toward the city he came from.

Where is he going? Al Berman said. I need his license. He stopped for no reason. He caused the crash.

Harry Craft, who knew it was Al Berman’s seventh crash in three years, thought about giving chase. The chauffeur didn’t seem to be running for police or a telephone. He seemed to be escaping. From what? All he did was stop for the light.

I know what it must be, Al Berman said. I heard about cases like this. He’s a phony hackie. He got no credentials.

Wish for it, Harry said.

What do you mean, Harry? You think it was my fault?

The police came flashing lights.

Al Berman grabbed his chest and howled.

Whatever happens, stay with the meat. Don’t leave the meat alone.

Al Berman went to the local doctor with the rectal bleeder and her husband. Harry Craft waited with the wreck. The passengers from the hack didn’t fraternize. They kept together talking of whiplash and contusions.

Traffic passed around the two cars.

Harry sat on a bent front seat, the door hanging by a hinge beside him. Strange eyes looked at him while they slowed to avoid pieces of debris. The man in the red jacket and white pants cursed the broken Dodge from across the road. Meat smell oozed into the split shell of the car.

Harry Craft, the victim, looked at dripping oil on melting tar.

Sad soup.

4.

A few miles south of where Harry Craft watched dark rainbows form on blacktop, other eyes watered.

A white LaSalle convertible, top down, hummed softly along. The convertible had a first-priority gas ration stamp on its windshield and a license plate with no numbers, only the initials MR NY. The car was the automotive equivalent of Fred Astaire tapping down the pavement in a fresh white suit. People noticed. A jowly driver in a car filled with women and children leaned over while the LaSalle shot past and said, Mr. New York.

I hear that twelve times a day, said Moe Rubin. Mr. New York. What a bunch of bananas.

And don’t you love it, you ox, said Leslie Quint, his fond companion.

Sure. I earned it. And nobody is taking it away. Which answers your question.

It don’t answer my question, Leslie said. I still don’t see why you have to put me up there. I think you’re giving yourself a vacation.

I told you those bonzos don’t kid around. This is for keeps, Leslie. They know they can get at me by getting at you.

Tears spilled from blue eyes behind sunglasses edged in rhinestone frames.

What a fucking world, Moe Rubin said.

He thought about the uncertain economics of peace, about the hungry bums who wanted the house he built, about the impossible young girl beside him and generally about the pursuit of happiness.

"Country shmuck," Moe Rubin said to a Ford he was passing.

Stop it, stop it, Leslie Quint said. What are you so angry about?

Cow shit.

This was your idea, Moe.

You want your jujubes busted?

Moe Rubin took on a Short Line bus. He swung into the wrong lane. A truck was coming at him. Moe psyched out the Short Line driver, who slowed enough to let the LaSalle cut in front of him. You feel better now? Leslie Quint said.

Not much.

I want to find a rest room.

We’ll stop at the Red Apple.

I’ll bust.

Piss machine.

Let’s go back to town.

When things are settled.

Leslie Quint moved closer to Moe Rubin to put her left hand on his thigh. Moe shoved her hand away. Back it came. He left it there.

I had a wife for thirty-six years, she should rest in peace. I said something, she did it. She didn’t bitch all day long. I said it, she did it.

You said it, she did it. Terrific. I still feel like you’re putting me in a safe-deposit box.

It would serve you right to leave you where they could get at you. For all I know you’re in their pocket.

What?

You heard me. For all I know.

Moe, you’re getting senile, pardon me for saying so.

Maybe that’s right. Maybe I’m crazy. Mr. New York.

If you were smart you’d let them have that stupid union.

Let them have it? I bought it. I paid for it. I gave ten years to it. Let them have it?

What do you need it for?

"What do I need it for? Jesus, she says what do I need it for? Ask the bovan bastards what they need it for."

They gave you the choice to retire.

Retire? Jesus, she says I should retire.

How come it is that it can’t be Grossinger’s? Leslie Quint said.

You got to see the logic. The whole point is a place they don’t know.

What’s it called again?

The Willow Spring. You’ll like it.

What do they do there?

They eat and shit. They play cards. Whatever they do you’ll do it.

Moe Rubin hit the brake. Cars crawled ahead of him.

Creep ignorant turds, he said, hitting the horn.

There’s trouble. I see police cars.

Accident. Some son of a bitch local yokel stuck his pole in the lighter.

You’re disgusting.

Moe Rubin lit a cigar and settled back to wait out the jam. Leslie Quint turned on the radio. All she got was static so she began singing. Her voice made Moe Rubin squirm. She sang to his scrotum. It vibrated like a receiver. And now he would be without her to Labor Day, maybe Yom Kippur. It was for her own good.

And she wouldn’t screw around. No problem at the Willow Spring. By the time he came back for her she would be climbing the bedpost. Then they would have a reunion. He would bring her a present, something terrific.

Moe watched a man and a boy load bags and boxes from the hulk of a wrecked Dodge onto the back of a pickup truck. The man moved slowly, in pain. The boy did most of the work. A State Trooper waved cars around the Dodge while a tow truck hooked into its mangled remains.

Suck your gun, Moe Rubin said as he hit the gas and raced around the Dodge.

What if he heard? It would serve you right.

Yeah?

How far is the Red Apple?

You sitting there thinking of the potty?

Moe Rubin passed a tractor driven by a bare-chested farmer with movie muscles. He watched Leslie look from her window then check in the rearview.

Old MacDonald had a prick, right?

Leslie Quint said something to her Kleenex.

Two weeks without that marble ass. When he saw her again she would have white tits and white around her pussy and butt. Everyplace else would be brown. Yum.

Maybe you’ll buy yourself a sunburn up there.

I could use some color.

You could use. I know what you could use.

The same old story, right. You know what I could use.

Moe Rubin steered the LaSalle around a small animal on the road.

That’s what I hate about the country, he said. Things.

Well, it was nice of you not to squish it.

Moe Rubin sighed. There was no way to win with that one. She was too young, too stacked. She had too many options. Wash her up on a beach and she would put out for cannibals. When a ship came to pick her up she would look rested.

A red apple. See the sign? Is that for the restaurant?

What the hell do you think it’s for?

That’s a cute sign, Leslie Quint said. No words.

5.

On the south side of Route 17 was The Orseck Boys. On the north side, The Red Apple Rest. Two restaurants practically identical.

Both oases had outdoor stands that sold hot dogs, hamburgers, lox and bagels, Cracker Jack, candy, Life Savers, postcards. Both had gas pumps and plenty of sanitary toilets with signs proclaiming them inspected, safe, boiled against any kind of bacteria.

Both had lines of buses parked in their lots, indication that the food and comfort stations were trusted by big companies with plenty to fear from the law.

Both had multitudes of identical customers, families, young studs, old ladies, girls in shorts, teen-agers in shirts that said Taft or Thomas Jefferson in block type, occasional loners who sat chewing and watching, clusters of humans from this or that bus with an eye on the driver who could pull out without them, smaller groups from the hacks, all in motion.

Inside the restaurants were huge cafeterias where everybody was his own waiter. If you had time, if you could find a table, you sat. Tables were shared with strangers, as at the Automat in New York. The difference was that here the strangers were interchangeable. A father could go and support the wrong family, or a mother nurse the wrong kids, and it might never be noticed.

All were Jews on the move to and from vacations, all except those who worked behind counters or took plates and flatware from the tables. They were locals with a pale, puzzled look of overwhelm. Their faces contrasted with the pure colors of Jell-O in tall cups, mountains capped with whipped cream peaks, the favorite dessert.

The colors of Jell-O, the colors of summer clothes—loose on the ordinary, tight on the dressers—the bounce of flesh from the five boroughs, the trays going through air at different planes, the screaming about spoiled appetites, number one and number two, doo-dee, cock-eee, the squirt of unrationed ketchup and mustard, the smells of french fries, pickles, relish, permanent waves, perfume, bodies on the way to and from two weeks of fun in the sun, pain in the rain, fumes from exhaust pipes, human and mechanical, the spiritual dimension added by the Orthodox in frock coats who ate from paper bags but drank Orseck or Red Apple tea and went suspiciously to the toilets holding nickels—it all came together in a redolent blur.

The Red Apple Rest had seniority. The Orseck Boys came later. Logically a planner would assume that traffic going north toward Monticello, capital of the Jewish Alps, would choose the Apple, and traffic coming south to New York would settle for the Boys. Not so.

Cars veered through insane dangers to cross the highway, depending on firm alliances. The habitues of The Red Apple Rest had contempt for The Orseck Boys, and vice versa.

Harry Craft speculated on this phenomenon while he sat eating his frank. He watched the rest rooms, where lines waited at the ENTRANCE and the relieved came out the EXIT pulling things back into place. Al Berman munched a bialy roll with a shmeer of cream cheese.

It hurt when Uncle Al swallowed. He broke two ribs in the crash. His torso was taped with wide bands of adhesive.

Also at their table were a couple from the stranded limousine, the rectal bleeder and her husband. Al Berman recruited them for the Willow Spring. Originally they were headed for Shimmers High Top Villa from an advertisement in the Daily Forward. It was easy for Al to change their course. As an Owner and Operator who raved about his own place, he carried impressive authority.

The woman, Mrs. Rifkin, sat on a rubber cushion. She admitted that her affliction was not caused by the bumper of the Dodge ramming her bottom. For years she had piles. Her husband confirmed this.

It’s a terrible thing, he said.

The fifth member of the party was a man named Gus who rented them his pickup truck for transportation. The Troopers found him. He agreed to take the travelers to Monticello for fifteen dollars, including bags, meat and cigarettes.

Excuse me, but would you mind changing the subject? I’m eating, Gus said.

I’m very sorry, said Mrs. Rifkin. Some people are sensitive.

He’s the captain, Al Berman said. We won’t talk about piles.

Knock wood nobody was killed, Mr. Rifkin said.

"God help the momzer they gave us for a driver. Such a person shouldn’t be allowed on the road," said Mrs. Rifkin.

We could all be dead, Al Berman said.

Wood was knocked. Harry Craft knocked with the rest. He realized he could have been eviscerated, a stain on the highway, blotted like a bug in his fifteenth year. Before doing anything, going anyplace, getting laid. Instead of sleeping in a refrigerator under a blanket, here he was at the halfway mark to Monticello, licking sauerkraut off the top of a fat frankfurter. Knock wood.

Listen, Gus, Al Berman said, I know we talked about Monticello. But the hotel is only a mile down the Old Liberty Road by the post office. You know it?

No.

A road is a road. If you could take us to the door it would save sending the house car, packing, unpacking. Be a sport. Give a little.

What’s a mile? said Mr. Rifkin.

"I got