Page 10 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Introduction

And the shtetl was not a monolithic entity, despite its idealization
ex post facto into a quaint rural setting where Jews lived an insular
and unchanging existence. As explained in Life is with People (by M.
Zborowski and E. Herzog, 1952), shtetl culture in varying strengths
and admixtures was found throughout Eastern Europe except among
the most assimilated urban Jews. AR’s mother, isolated in her home,
was a great force retaining and reinforcing traditional values; his
father, despite encouraging AR in his Talmudic studies, was more
ambivalent. David Israel Rothstein’s status in the community—
earned by activism on others’ behalf—paradoxically depended on his
involvement in the larger, non-Jewish Polish world of courts and
officials and government documents. He was, in short, a shtadln, a
type described in Life is with People (pp. 234-5): a self-sacrificing
intermediary who knew how to deal with the Gentiles.
Other aspects of shtetl life detailed in that book are found in
AR’s narrative: the child’s first day in cheder, the parents’ unceasing
efforts to educate their sons, the importance of the Sabbath, the
status of the shochet, the intricacies of arranged marriage, the funeral
cortege, the matchmaker, the Gentile peasant, the chasidim. An
interesting section (pp. 357-360), dealing with attitudes toward parts
of the body, bears some relation to the anatomical emphases AR gave
his sculpture. Life is with People may present an excessively
sentimentalized picture of the shtetl, but it provides a useful
grounding in the environment out of which AR emerged in 1903, a
young man with roots in the past to be transplanted in the New
World.
Another book serves to locate AR in his American context— at
least the years in New York and his early experiences in Los
Angeles. World of our Fathers (Irving Howe, 1976) places the
immigrant in “a period in which the opposing impulses of faith and
skepticism stand poised, one fiercely opposed to the other yet both
sharing a community of values” (p. 16). The political and intellectual
movements in which AR became involved are clearly described in
Howe’s work, as are the sweatshops, the community organizations,
the 1908 depression, the lectures and classes, the survival of
Yiddishkeit in alien soil. The book also gives a valuable sociological
analysis of the shtetl refugees, distinguishing those who came before
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