Serevan

We had dinner at Serevan on the last night of my trip to New York in October 2021, my sister Tamar, her beau, Ryder and I. It’s our favorite restaurant.  We ate in the lovely, warm, low ceilinged dining room.  It’s a room where I can still hear my father’s booming laugh. We had so many happy, and incredibly tasty meals there.  Serge, the owner and chef, came out to say hello, although with Covid, I did not get the usual bear hug.  Tamar had a poached carrot appetizer, one of the most delicious dishes we’ve had in a restaurant where delicious is the norm.  Serge is an Armenian from Iran, and his cooking draws from that heritage and from his commitment to local foods.  Everything he makes has some surprising taste.  I won’t go through all the dishes we ate, but those carrots cannot go unmentioned.

Serge regularly comes out to greet diners – new guests and old friends alike.  But he had a special relationship with our parents – especially Dad.  When Serge was just starting Servevan 17 years ago, he was short of cash.  I never knew the details, but Dad loaned him some money.  It is more accurate to say that Dad prepaid for a great many fabulous meals. Dad loved few things more than to take a bunch of us out for dinner, to laugh, to eat, to congratulate ourselves on what a wonderful family we were, and to bask in Serge’s warmth. Late in their lives, when Mom and Dad didn’t go out much, Serge and his twin Rouben would often visit them on a weekend morning, Serge bringing mouth watering fresh pastries, and Rouben coaxing them to do a little yoga with him.

If you find Serevan on a map you will see that it sits just on the north side of NY Route 44.  Coming from Mabbettsville, west of Serevan, Route 44 emerges from the woods on high ground and makes a sharp turn, opening onto a spectacular view of the Harlem Valley before it descends towards Serevan and the town of Amenia. When my Dad was young, perhaps a teen or younger, he was riding with a family friend on some business and came over Route 44 and saw, and instantly fell in love with, that vista. Dad lived in the city at the time, two hours away, but during the summers his resourceful mother ran a cluster of summer cabins in the Catskills, enabling her to get her five children out of the hot city summers. I believe it was one of the occupants of those cabins who took Dad on that outing. Dad never forgot the view of that beautiful valley.

Perhaps 20 or more years later, in 1953 when Dad was 34, he overheard, quite by chance, a conversation about an abandoned summer camp for sale in Amenia.  He remembered that view and asked if he could see the property.  This was, some might say (and did), a crazy move.  We had just returned from Israel, my parents, their three children (the youngest was not yet born), and our recently widowed grandmother.  Dad had just started his business, Jet Party Favors.  We had taken on a great many expenses – moving into a larger apartment than we had left before we went to Israel, buying a new car and a television, and Dad had no savings at all.  On top of that, no one in his family had owned a house, let alone property, at least since his parents had emigrated to the US.  The camp was 74 acres.  Buying it was an insane idea.

If you continue east on Route 44 from Serevan for about half a mile you come to a little dirt road leading north into the woods, Old Ore Bed Road.  The camp was at the end of that little road, a half mile through the woods from 44, past the lake that had once been an open pit iron ore mine.  The camp was a wildly overgrown meadow with a big shack of a building that had been the mess hall, a smaller shack on the hillside that had been a shower house, a tumble down outhouse, a pond, and richly treed hills all around for perfect privacy. There was a well, but no electricity. Mom and Dad fell in love with the place.  I’ve seen pictures of it in the state they first saw it, when I was almost 5, and it would have required a huge leap of imagination to see it as the paradise that it became for us, for our children, for a wonderful circle of friends and their children, for our whole extended family. But my parents made that leap and found the courage to borrow every dime of the $5000 asking price.  With that courage and vision they changed all our lives.  So when Dad sat at Serevan in his 80s and congratulated himself on how well his life had worked out, he had much to be proud of.

This story, the story of our coming to Amenia that our October dinner at Serevan brought to the surface, leads in so many directions.  There are the stories of my parents, who they were, the marriage and family they made.  There are the stories of our summers and weekends in Amenia and the ways they shaped our lives. There are the stories of the town of Amenia itself and its interesting history and the history of its little Jewish community.  And there are the stories of the land, its geology and the native peoples who lived there for generations before Europeans invaded.  I don’t know how many of those stories I’ll write, but they are probably the most important stories I want my grandchildren to know. When I finish writing them, I’ll have to drop Serge a note to remind him of our dinner there this October, the amazing poached carrots, and where all that led me.