Screenshot
Bonfire
My father Arthur was born in 1912 in the Catskill town of Liberty NY some years after his parents, my grandmother Esther and my grandfather Sam, had emigrated to the States from Ukraine. (See The Wheat Field)
At first they had settled among other Eastern European Jews in New York’s lower eastside where Sam worked as a cutter in a garment district sweatshop. But he developed emphysema and was advised to leave the city for the cleaner air in the country.
And so they resettled in the Catskills in a small town that was more like the Russian shtetl they had left. There they tried their hands at dairy farming, and my dad often reminisced about his boyhood on that farm. (See Catskill Farm Memories)
And one of his earliest memories – one he recalled vividly – was of a cold November night in 1918 when as a six-year-old he went with his older sister Frances and their parents to a large field.
There the townspeople had built a roaring bonfire and he remembers all of them holding hands and dancing around it to celebrate the end of the Great War!
– Dana Susan Lehrman
Dana Susan LehrmanThis retired librarian loves big city bustle and cozy country weekends, friends and family, good books and theatre, movies and jazz, travel, tennis, Yankee baseball, and writing about life as she sees it on her blog World Thru Brown Eyes!
www.WorldThruBrownEyes.com
