Learning about farming and sex in the Catskills

Greenfields Kochalayn

By Ira Spector

SAN DIEGO — On June 5, 1944, General Eisenhower made the fateful decision to begin the invasion of the Normandy beaches. The world has not been the same since. In July of that year my parents made the decision to rent a kochalayn for the summer in the Catskill Mountains, which changed my eleven-year-old world forever. A kochalayn, literally translated by the indisputable book, “It happened in the Catskills,” by Myrna and Harvey Frommer, means ‘cook alone.” Its eastern European origin derives from many Jewish single women cooking alone in a common kitchen in the boarding house in which they lived. Colloquial Jewish-American interpretation has expanded the definition to include rented bungalows in the “country,” (read the Catskill Mountains). The grouped-together bungalows were called “Colonies.” The one my parents rented was a tiny two-bedroom unit in “Greenfield’s Bungalow Colony,” in rural Accord, New York The colony consisted of twelve duplex cottages. Rent for the entire summer was seventy-five dollars. My mother, sister, and I stayed there for the entire season. My father drove up from Brooklyn every weekend.

Across the road from the colony was “Louis Cohen’s dairy farm.” The only way to tell he was Jewish was the name. He didn’t look Jewish! Louis had a raw bone, muscular body, honed by years of hard farm work. His voice didn’t sound Jewish. He was quiet and soft spoken, a rarity in my heritage, Jewish farmers in America were as rare then as underpaid professional athletes are today. Louie had a fine herd of milking cows grazing in a flat pasture that became my playground. It was great adventure to overturn hard, white granite rocks speckled with black syinite specks and find one or more garter snakes wiggling angrily at being discovered. The rock homes sheltered the reptiles from the hot sun’s rays. I always searched with my head down, carefully avoiding the innumerable “cow paddies.” Clucking chickens and strutting roosters freely roamed in and out of the barn and other outbuildings. The hens laid their eggs daily in assorted nooks and nests. Finding the fresh eggs every day was like an Easter hunt. After the eggs were gathered, they were fitted onto the open mouth of the candling tube that had a lighted bulb on the other end. The egg became transparent and it could be determined if they were good, bad, old or fertilized. The eggs that passed inspection were crated and sold.

Once a week, a solemn slim bearded man in a wrinkled white shirt showed up. He had long buttoned sleeves wore a black tie and black vest. On his head was perched a black fedora hat. He was the “shochet,” a Jewish man duly authorized by a rabbi to slit a chicken’s neck (a license to kill with accompanying prayers, while draining its blood according to Jewish law. Without this ritual, the chickens would not be certified kosher. I could only watch this slaughter once. It was the first time I had ever seen anything deliberately killed.

Louie grew hay to feed his herd of cows and horses. I was privileged to help mow and stack the hay onto his horse drawn wagon. As he had taught me, I swung the scythe in a great sweeping arc as low to the base of the stalks as possible, enjoying the smell emitted as my blade did its work. Grasshoppers and crickets leaped out of the way as I cut. When enough hay was on the ground, I took a big wooden rake and stacked it into heaps big enough to grab with a pitchfork. Louie shushed the horses with the reins from pile to pile, stopping long enough for me to thrust the pitchfork into the heap and swing it over my shoulder in a high arc onto the wagon. When I reached the height limit I could pile, Louie got down off his seat and hurled the hay higher and higher until it was as high as the stack could go. One dark, magic evening, he invited all the kids and as many adults as could climb aboard, onto the top of the full load of hay. We spent a leisurely couple of hours trotting down an empty country road, made emptier by wartime gasoline rationing. We chatted gaily in a care free manner while gazing at the billions of twinkling stars shining brilliantly in the smog free night as millions of soldiers were fighting and dying to protect this freedom.

One of these warriors was Mr. Greenfield’s son Johnny, a B-24 bomber pilot. Towards the end of summer, he got all excited with great news. Johnny was coming home! He had completed fifty-five missions in Europe, and would arrive at the colony in a week. In preparation Mr. Greenfield carefully lettered in large bright orange letters across a full sheet of white painted plywood, “WELCOME HOME JOHNNY,” a message to be repeated in the next two years all across America.

The entire colony gathered at the bridge spanning the creek near the entrance watching him nail the sign to the wooden crossbar overhanging the bridge. As he lovingly banged in the last nail, he turned around and there was his handsome, uniformed, be-medaled son John waiting for him with open arms. It was the most emotional greeting I had ever seen in my young life.

In the days to come, I hung around Johnny as much as I could. I’d never known a real hero in my eleven years, although I had seen quite a few on the movie screen. I just enjoyed looking at his handsome face. I was crushed when I learned a few months later he was killed over Miami, Florida, when his airplane blew up.

One week my older, learned, fourteen-year-old cousin, Norman, came to stay with us. When he and I were watching a bull mount a cow in the pasture, Norman proclaimed, “That’s how calves are created!” “Nah!” I replied incredulously. “Yup,” he said, “in fact that’s how people are made too.” My childhood was turned upside-down forever.

There was another creek about a twenty-five-minute walk from our colony. One part of the creek ran over a depression of flat, white granite rock, which made the cold water free of mud so clear I could easily read the newspaper page sunk to the bottom of the three feet-deep stream. On each side of the banks were closely grown tall oaks and poison sumac trees. At two locations, about seventy-five yards apart and invisible from each other, were areas where part of the flat granite outcrop was above water. By tradition, (there were no signs anywhere), the upstream location was reserved for mostly young women who wanted to bath in the nude. They mostly stayed at a small hotel nearby. The outcrop downstream was similarly reserved for men. These oases were designated as “BA”s [bare ass].

At this point in the story, I should speak about ethics and morals, of which my fellow male playmates and I had none. Our jumping adolescent hormones took priority over everything. Whenever we could, we lads would sneak a peek and enjoy the wonders of this unfamiliar titillating flesh. We gazed until we were discovered by sharp-eyed female spoilsports, and we fled for our lives.

One day, Cousin Norman and I told the secret of the creek to our fathers who were up for the weekend. Both of these men were Godlike creatures, walked on water, and could turn water into wine if they needed a drink. They instructed us to take them to the women’s “BA” location, where all four of us copped a long leisurely look through the trees. It was my first instance of male bonding with my father. Ah! A wonderful educational summer. Indeed.

Epilogue: Fifty-seven years later, I was passing through Accord, New York, for the first time since that summer. It had grown so much I found it unrecognizable. I stopped at a large tree nursery to inquire about the B A hoping to nostalgically “cop a peek” again. I spoke to a young girl in her twenties, a native of the area. She remembered swimming in the area as a kid. There was no nude bathing. “Back then it was called “smitties.” I asked her to tell me how to find it. She said, “Your too late, it has been a housing development for years.”

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Ira Spector is an author and freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? .An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.