By Any Other Name   

That may be the best way to explain the name “Four Roses Bungalow Colony,” because I assure you that in a million years, no one could find a single rose in that place, let alone four. Four Roses, where I spent my summers as a child 45 years ago, was a motley collection of some 30 hovels situated on the perimeter of a forlorn property in the Catskills. Yet, the enjoyment we experienced there was in inverse proportion to its physical condition. In fact, its dilapidated state — which somehow reflected the honest and kind but curmudgeonly personalities of its owners, Mr. and Mrs. Rozsa — determined and defined its occupants.

It wasn’t that the chevreh was poor; in fact, some were quite well off. But there wasn’t much stuff in Four Roses. It had, in spades, however, a much more valuable commodity — camaraderie. My enduring image of Four Roses is a great circle of beach chairs, populated by mothers shooting the breeze, speaking in rapid-fire French peppered with peals of hysterical laughter that rippled through the humid Catskills air. (The women who didn’t belong to the two extended French-speaking families at the colony spent their days scrambling for an explanation of the latest joke.)

Chazal say, “Marbeh nechasim, marbeh da’agah — increasing one’s possessions increases one’s worries” — and the families who stayed at Four Roses can affirm that the inverse of that rule is also true. No stuff, no stress.

For us, the colony was the most carefree place in the world.