In the Swim - 2nd in a series of Catskill stories

I had always been different from my American-born classmates, with my foreign-born and older parents, and being foreign-born myself. Whatever village, town, or city we lived in, I hadn't grown up there. In addition, I'd worn thick glasses for nearsightedness and astigmatism from the age of eight. I was unattractive, a bookworm, and had no social graces.

One of the skills I lacked was the ability to swim. "Don't worry," Mother told me when we moved to Woodridge. "Someday, Daddy will build a pool for you, and you'll learn how to swim." This was preposterous, and I told Mother so. We were not in the economic and social class of people who had their own pools.

For our first five years in Woodridge, New York, Mother and Dad rented a house from an elderly woman with a witch-like appearance named Mrs. Maloff, whom Mother and Dad called derogatorily di Malofke--the Maloff. They turned the house into a kokhaleyn, a "cook-alone" place. Stefan Kanfer, in his book A Summer World, had this to say about kokhaleyns:

"These “cook-alones” were improperly named. The patrons slept in separate rooms of a large house but shared the overpopulated communal kitchen. There, the heat, combined with the squealing children underfoot, the closeness of bodies, and the absence of men during the week led to desperate cooperation and violent argument."

The kokhaleyn was an establishment where the residents cooked for themselves and their families as opposed to a hotel, where the hotel staff prepared the meals. The kokhaleyn, which was near the bottom of the ladder in the resort business, was common to the Catskills. A family would rent a single room for the season, from Memorial Day through Labor Day. The women would cook in the communal kitchen; the men would work at their jobs in "the City" [New York] during the week and join their families for the weekend.

After five years in Woodridge, Dad came home one day and announced that he had just bought a parcel of land in Monticello. It was time to move up the ladder in the resort business, from a kokhaleyn in the village of Woodridge to a bungalow colony in the town of Monticello, about ten miles northwest of Woodridge. Monticello was the county seat of Sullivan County, with a population of about 3,500 in the winter, which swelled to 75,000 to 100,000 during the summer season. My father bought fifty acres of land from the Gusars, a family that owned a drugstore in Monticello. This property, on route 42, the Port Jervis Road, had a frontage of 500 feet and acres and acres of pine trees. Father said he would build twenty-five bungalows on the property and name it the Pine Tree Bungalow Colony. He was true to his word.

By l941, when we moved from Woodridge to Monticello, there were just the three of us—my parents and I. My brother Hermann had met Helen Wurman, a summer vacationer, while we were living in Woodridge. He subsequently married her and opened a candy store in Long Beach, Long Island.

After the bungalows were built, my father added a handball court and a swimming pool. My mother's prediction had come true. My father did indeed build a swimming pool. And that's where I learned to swim.

Copyright 1999 by Sonia Pressman Fuentes.