The "mountains" evoke marathon meals rather than literary salons, but
writers whose books are set in the borscht belt served up verbal schmaltz
spiked with cynicism at Kutsher's Country Club last weekend.
Sidney Offit, author of the 1959 novel "He Had It Made," hoped to do
comedy shtick when he reported for work at his mother-in-law's Catskill
resort, the Aladdin Hotel, almost 50 summers ago. "An hour-and-a-half later I
was in the kitchen."
When Offit, the new food steward, failed to order enough "specials" (jumbo
frankfurters), a deprived guest went wild. "There was nothing to prepare me
for the savagery we were attacked with when we ran out of things," Offit told
the audience at the sixth annual History of the Catskills Conference.
The first draft of his novel about a scheming waiter, reissued by Beckam
Publications last year, lacked a key ingredient: a love interest. Offit added
an affair with the boss's daughter. (In real life, Offit had eloped with the
daughter of the proprietor of the Aladdin Hotel the year before.)
Offit's book remains "the best account of dining room and kitchen life ever
written," said the conference organizer, Phil Brown, author of "Catskill
Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area" and a
sociology professor at Brown University, whose mother was a hotel chef.
Terry Kay, author of "Shadow Song," a 1994 novel about a Georgia
farmboy-turned-busboy who falls for a Jewish guest during the summer of '55,
experienced "only one kiss in three years" of waiting tables in the
mountains, but he fell in love with the food. He used some of his earnings to
fly his mother up for a meal.
At lunch, Norma Bernstock, 54, a conference participant and photographer from
New Jersey, dug into the kasha varnishkes. She spent childhood summers at a
Monticello bungalow colony. "I had to eat in the children's dining room," she
groaned, as hotel guests, from old-timers with walkers and first-timers in
strollers, descended on Kutsher's massive dining room.
Out of respect for her family, Tania Grossinger refrained from dishing all
the dirt when she wrote her 1975 memoir, "Growing Up at Grossinger's." Had
the book been either a straight "puff piece" or "the inside story," it might
have been a best-seller, she said.
"Never straddle the fence!" cautioned Grossinger, who just wrote a novel,
"Magda's Daughter," which is partly set in the Catskills.
And don't skimp on the "specials."
