Free In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" by Phil Brown Page A

Why do I tell you this? My wife, Bessie, hates the country. She misses the bargains on Orchard Street and her cronies with whom she could babble and play cards. She’s waging war on me. And what a war! She went on strike. She doesn’t cook, she doesn’t bake, she doesn’t clean the house. She refuses to budge and I do everything—milk the cow, dig in the garden, clean the outhouse. I should not tell you, but she refuses to be a wife. She wants me to move back to New York. But what will I do in New York? We have given up the rent-controlled apartment and gotten rid of the furniture. Here we have something like a home—”
    “How about your daughter?”
    “My Sylvia takes after her mother. She’s already over thirty and she should have gotten married, but she never wanted to become anything. We tried to send her to college and she refused to study. She took all kinds of jobs but she never stuck with them. She has quite a good head, but no sitzfleisch . She tires of everything. She went out with all kinds of men and it always ended in nothing. The moment she meets one, she immediately begins to find fault with him. One is this way, the other one is that way. For the past eight months she’s been with us on the farm, and if you think she helps me much, you are mistaken. She plays cards with her mother. That’s all she does. You will not believe me, but my wife still has not unpacked her things. She has, God only knows, how many dresses and skirts, and everything is packed away like after a fire. My daughter, too, has a lot of rags but hers are also in her trunk. All this is to spite me. So I decided, Let some people move in here and I will have someone to talk to. We have two other rooms to rent. I’m not trying to get rich by offering a room and three meals a day for ten dollars weekly. I won’t become a Rockefeller. What is your business? Are you a teacher or something?”
    After some hesitation I decided to tell him the truth, that I write for a Yiddish newspaper as a free-lancer. The man’s eyes immediately lit up.
    “What is your name? What do you write there?”
    “ A Bundle of Facts .”
    The farmer spread out his arms and stamped his feet. “You are the writer of A Bundle of Facts ?”
    “It’s me.”
    “My God, I read you every week! I go to the village Friday especially to get the paper, and you won’t believe me, but I read A Bundle of Facts before I even read the news. The news is all bad. Hitler this, Hitler that. He should burn like a fire, the bum, the no-good. What does he want from the Jews? Is it their fault that Germany lost the war? From just reading about it one could get a heart attack. But your facts are knowledge, science. Is it true that a fly has thousands of eyes?”
    “Yes, it’s true.”
    “How can it be? Why does a fly need so many eyes?”
    “It seems that to nature everything comes easy.”
    “If you want to see the beauty of nature, stay here. Wait a minute. I must go and tell my wife who we have here.”
    “What for? I’m not going to stay here anyhow.”
    “What are you saying? Why not? They are bitter women, but when they hear who you are, they will be overjoyed. My wife reads you too. She tears the paper out of my hand because she wants to read A Bundle of Facts first. My daughter also knows Yiddish. She spoke Yiddish before she knew a word of English. With us she speaks mostly Yiddish because—”
    The farmer dashed out. His heavy shoes pounded on the steps. The heifer kept howling. There was frenzy in her voice, an almost-human rebellion. I sat down on the mattress and dropped my head. Lately I had been committing one folly after another. I had quarreled with Dosha over a foolishness. I had already spent money to get here and tomorrow I would have to take a taxi and a bus to get back to New York. I had begun to write a novel but I got bogged down and I couldn’t even decipher my own scribbling. As I sat here, the heat roasted my body. If only there were a shade