One remaining sign of life was also a call for death: A tattered demolition permit clung to a fence cordoning off the driveway to Grossinger’s, formerly a 1,200-acre resort that made the Catskill Mountains worth the trip. The permit, hanging on in 2021, approved the destruction of the hotel’s most upscale building from the retreat’s 1960s heyday.
Everything else around it had yellowed or rotted away—the grass, the hotel stairwells where crowds once clogged the steps, and on nearby farms, the chicken coops. The hotel’s surviving walls became canvases for graffitists and backdrops for photoshoots by high schoolers playing hooky, testing how many friends could fit on one of its last pool chairs before its ancient webbing surrendered.
Most of Grossinger’s structures were demolished by the time I reached ninth grade, so stories of these midday excursions comprised cool kids’ lore at my high school—roughly 20 miles away from the hotel—where I was one of about four Jewish kids, including my brother.
Alas, the Borscht Belt, a summer getaway for Jews barred from gentile-owned vacation spots and a rural refuge for Holocaust survivors to start again, was nearly dead.
Michelle Friedman, who grew up on a Catskills farm alongside 20,000 chickens, has a few stories left to tell in her memoir. Her account chronicles her upbringing in the hamlet of Divine Corners as the child of Polish Holocaust survivors—both of whom witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto. Friedman animates each character with their skill for inflicting pain, unpacking decades of trauma in a household where sentimentality was shunned.
The passing of her abusive father, Arnold—who “crackled with tension like the electrified wire cattle fences”—but also saved his sister and mother after persuading a Polish woman to hide them in her attic during Nazi occupation—”liberated [her] curiosity” to hunt for the origin of her family’s troubles.
Arnold’s rage pervaded Friedman’s house. Once his beatings began, any intervention was “like gasoline thrown to a fire.” Her mother, Regina, watched motionless while her youngest and only son, Jay, endured his lashings. Decades later, when Arnold died shortly after his 96th birthday, Friedman was the sole child to attend his funeral.
But divorce would have separated Regina from the one person who kept her past alive; everyone else she knew had been killed. Arnold could describe “the smell of the countryside” and “the local landmarks” in Wegrow, Regina’s hometown where her husband had briefly lived. To Regina, that may have been enough of a reason to stay.
To Friedman, tales of Regina’s escape from Nazi-occupied Poland made her the heroine of her own story. She leapt off a deportation truck headed to Treblinka into a bush. When Regina’s father never came to meet them in the designated hideout, the pair secured false documents and set off into Warsaw. After supplies depleted while hiding with extended family in a makeshift bunker, Regina volunteered to forage but was stopped by a Ukrainian soldier.
“You are a Jew,” he said, raising his rifle to shoot her. She rejected the accusation and, following her recitation of the Pater Noster, he lowered his gun, pulled a chocolate bar from his pocket, leisurely unwrapping it while holding his stare. She led him to a potato farm where miraculously a school friend was digging. After the friend’s sister began flirting with the soldier, he shelved his Jew-killing quest for enough time to let Regina blend in.
Her parents’ “survival saga” even pervaded Friedman’s bus rides to school. “I scanned the landscape for hideouts and escape routes in case another war or Holocaust broke out,” she wrote. “Would that porch be a safe place?” It fed into her desire to be a Girl Scout, deciding she needed to learn survival in the woods.
The uniqueness of these experiences heightened Friedman’s insularity as a somewhat secular Jew who disliked the mud almost as much as the rednecks from which she felt disconnected and the Hasidim. But she struggled with a longing to connect to locals, especially her siblings, who gradually slipped away. Her older sister, Lisa, left for Israel and limited contact. Meanwhile, Jay, a Boo Radley type, departed for Seattle. “Don’t call me,” he told Friedman after falling ill with pancreatic cancer. When permitted visitation, she remarked how quickly the disease had eaten at his body, turning it into “that of a concentration-camp prisoner.” Jay wished his money go to Planned Parenthood—a possible signal that he wished he was never born.
His one wish was to be cremated. Friedman obliged her younger brother, defying Jewish law’s prohibition and submitting to the situation’s morbid irony. She zipped up his body in a duvet from Divine Corners, hand-sewn by their mother years ago.
Friedman’s account details the strains of erasure—of bloodlines, siblinghood, and friendships. The Nazi genocide overshadowed her life on a farm meant to offer a fresh start. But her musings of the Holocaust ensnared her, “like some black hole of dense gravity.” When Friedman traveled back to Wegrow with her father years later, she was struck by the landscape’s resemblance to Divine Corners, where just miles away lay another small farm.
Back in America, Friedman traveled upstate only to find the site of her first life had disappeared. Both her childhood home and the coops were wiped out as though they’d never existed.
In 2022, one year after I graduated high school, a fire incinerated the rest of Grossinger’s, with lesser-known hotels also on their way out, leaving the memory of the Borscht Belt relegated to its aging former patrons and the youth’s desire to keep telling its stories.