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

at the foot of the stone road, carved into the wood in seductive script, read:
     
COHEN’S SUMMER COTTAGES
LEISURE MACHT FREI!
     
    “Keep up with me, you’re falling behind,” Rosa said. She was wearing a black polka-dot dress with flowing chiffon lace that floated in the air. Moving smartly between branches and twigs, she cut through the woods like an animal beginning its evening hunt.
    “I can’t walk this fast,” a whining voice trailed her brisk pace, “it’s too dark…. I’m tripping over acorns.”
    The sky was seared in blackness. A few resilient stars wriggled free of the buried pack. With flashlights, mother and son made their way into the forest. Beams sliced between trees, startling mosquitoes, overexposing fireflies, scattering milky streaks through the bushes.
    “We’re going to be late for my game,” she said. “Do you want your mama to miss her bingo game? Think what we could win.”
    From behind and stammering: “What can we win?”
    “Let’s see …” she ruminated, pointing the flashlight down against her side, a white mist of light dappling the ground. “They have a blender and a seltzer maker. Ida, next door, tells me there is a bagel slicer; you just put the bagel in a plastic cover, and then slice like regular. No more cutting my hand. Such good prizes, no?”
    “We’ll never use any of that junk—even if we do win.” The child was not easily tempted by convenience, nor fooled by deceit.
    “Don’t argue with me,” she said. “I need to practice for the big game when summer is over—the one at Cohen’s. He offers a cash grand prize.”
    “Why do we have to go? Can’t we just stay home tonight? Lucy’s on television.”
    Rosa turned around, lifted the flashlight, and planted a perfect moon over her face. In a possessed voice she said, “What do you think puts food on our table?”
    “Bingo?”
    “Bingo!”
    “How does a bagel slicer put food on our table?”
    “Every little bit helps.”
    “But we went last night….”
    “And we go tonight. Tomorrow we will go to Krause’s Colony for a movie at their concession. The Three Stooges are playing. We’ll have bagels, lox, and cream cheese. That you’ll like.”
    And with that offer she danced through the woods, waving her arms like a sorceress, skipping around each tree; then she turned swiftly to flash a ray of light on her young son, who by now had resigned himself to the night’s bingo game.
    Two years earlier Rosa’s husband had died, suddenly. His heart stopped. Just gave up. They had been two survivors who left much behind in that European graveyard—except death, which must have been lonely, or simply wasn’t yet finished with the family. With Morris’s parting, the task of raising Adam fell to her, alone.
    Rosa Posner, fragile, a thin face with full lips, an unforgetting purple scar molded on her forehead, feared being a widow with child in a new land. Like the other refugees, she stumbled over the language. She did not know the secret handshakes that seemed so natural for immigrants who came before the war. And of course there was the concern over money. “ Ach, geld. Ich brauch mehr geld .” Her money worries never allowed her mind a minute’s rest.
    “I know from nothing except how to survive,” she pondered. In the camps she had been a saboteur, a black-market organizer, an underground operator. It took years to relearn the simple etiquette of life among the living. “Who in this country needs to know from such things?”
    They lived in a middle-class section of Brooklyn. Ethnics at every corner. Dark walk-up apartment houses. Trees planted at the foot of the curb, in front of some buildings, but not others. It was a borough built mostly of stone and concrete, not entirely in harmony with nature.
    One day, joining a card game in Brooklyn, Rosa learned that she had a knack for recalling numbers, and a certain streakiness with luck that seemed to will the royalty of the deck in her