Author Molly Golubcow of Ventnor.
By NANETTE LoBIONDO GALLOWAY
VENTNOR – A local woman wrote on the blank pages of her book about her Holocaust-surviving parents operating a hotel in the 1970s on St. James Place – a place where lifestyles could have clashed but didn’t.
“Hitler was a strange matchmaker,” Molly Golubcow’s father Harry would often say about his new life operating a resort hotel on seedy St. James Place, just a clamshell’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean.
In a series of short stories, Molly Golubcaw tells the sad and sometimes comical stories of her Polish immigrant parents and their years catering and caring for a colorful cast of characters that included pimps, prostitutes, runaways, drug addicts, alcoholics, and the LGBTQ community before they had those now acceptable initials.
“As a kid it was like living in a movie,” she said about her summers living in the Seacrest Hotel. “It was quite a group to grow up with, and my summers were bizarre.”
Her book, which was recently published by Bartleby Press of Silver Springs, Maryland, has a telling title, “The Hotel on St. James Place: Growing up in Atlantic City between the Boardwalk and the Holocaust.”
“The characters are memorable and there’s something for everyone,” she said.
Each chapter profiles the juxtaposition between one of the people “not like us” who stayed in the rooms and her parents, whose strict Jewish upbringing was vastly different.
“They had to juggle that every day. But it was surprising that they had a natural tolerance and empathy for them,” she said. “It could have very easily been the other way around, especially considering the cruelties my parents experienced during the war.”
Golubcaw’s parents grew up in a small town in Poland and didn’t even know there was such a thing as gay people or Black people, she said.
“Well, maybe they did, but it wasn’t out in the open like it is now,” she said.
Harry and Sonia Golubcow, 1946.
Harry Golubcow was sent to live in a ghetto and was to be executed and put into a mass grave, but by some miracle, he was able to join a band of partisans that lived hidden in the woods for two years. Her mother Sonia, “by dumb luck” was able to walk east toward Russia and was spared the horrors of the extermination. After the war, she learned that the entire family she left behind had been murdered by the Nazis.
They married after the war and immigrated to America, settling in Ventnor. Thrust into a new world, they bought the Atlantic City hotel and eeked out a living, raising their daughter in the midst of the vastly different “sensibilities” of the guests of the Seacrest Hotel.
“We lived in Ventnor, but our summers were spent in Atlantic City. I went to the Ventnor schools and Atlantic City High School, the whole nine yards,” she said. “All of the other kids were hanging out at the Ventnor Pier, and I was living with the type of characters most people don’t want to associate with.”
Through the years, the Golubcows became friends, parents, teachers and saviors to their quirky and often troubled guests.
“Each person that passes Harry’s front desk begins a new tale about a Seacrest Hotel guest who made an impression on Molly. Some are sad and others dangerous, but they all have a story to tell. And how they lead Molly – and us – into a darker misfit world of Atlantic City in those days.”
With a degree in English, Molly Golubcow has been a writer her entire career. She started writing with crayons in the blank pages of her brother’s notebook and progressed to technical writing, writing policy manuals, short stories, magazine articles and news stories.
The book – her first – got its start in 2005 as a short story about one of the hotel guests, which she shared with friends who encouraged her to keep writing. That story is now the first chapter and sets the pace for the 17 chapters that follow, she said.
By happenstance, she met the Bartleby publisher at a party. He was “a friend of a friend of a friend” and was intrigued by her story.
“He said, ‘Keep writing, I want to publish your story,’ and years later, he did,” she said.
The book adds up to “an unforgettable journey of resilience, survival and acceptance,” the publisher wrote upon the book’s release.
It has received good reviews, the author said.
“I’ve been touched by the interest spurred in learning about Atlantic City. For people my age, the book brings back some nostalgia and the smell of cotton candy emanating from the Boardwalk before the age of casinos.”
Today, St. James Place is part of the up-and-coming “Orange Loop” redevelopment area, so called because it is one of the most valuable and most landed-on orange colored deeds on the Monopoly board game. The hotel still stands a few doors down from the Irish Pub, although it’s not a hotel anymore.
The book is available at bookstores, Amazon and other online retailers.
Molly Golubcow is currently writing her second book, a detective novel set in Atlantic City.
Copyright Mediawize, LLC 2021
