Page 112 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Escape to New York

I was given sixteen days furlough to prepare my luggage for the
army. A recruit was trained three months in the army before he
became a full soldier, and during that period he wore his civilian
clothing. Since the recruiting season was the coldest time of the year,
every recruit had to have a fur-lined coat and good boots to wear in
those Russian steppes where they usually sent the men from Poland.
This outfit he had to furnish himself. One had to have a bashlik, too,
a hood made out of heavy woolen material. It was just as important
as boots, for without a bashlik one’s ears would freeze off in an hour.
As soon as we came home from the examination, I went into
“retirement”: I became morose and grouchy. Nobody could look at
me, and I did not see or hear anybody around me. I felt like a sinner
or a social outcast, and wanted to hide from people’s gaze.
Everybody had sympathy for me but they did not know how to
express it, and just kept looking at me. It was very hard for me to be
at home and hear the family sighing and crying. A trunk for my
wardrobe was being made by a tenant of my grandfather’s, a Polack
who made all kinds of reed chairs and baskets. My mother was
preparing this military trousseau, sewing flannel underwear, knitting
heavy woolen socks, and hemming big red handkerchiefs. She made
me six shirts and a small tallit with long threads, and obtained prayer
books for me. But we never discussed the coming day when I would
have to join the regiment gathering at the old bridge in Praga on our
side of the Vistula. There an ocean of tears is poured out by mothers
and sisters, wives and children, when one is mustered in and sent
away thousands of miles to districts like Siberia, the Caucasus,
Bukhara, and far into the Steppes.
I used to observe those scenes every fall of the year in recruiting
time while on my way to work from Pelcovizna to Warsaw, when I
passed the “choosing place,” as it was called. My mother was aging
and weak from an attack of pneumonia and the blood poisoning
operation on her arm; she would not have survived the ordeal of
seeing me mustered in. I had seen a mother clinging to her son,
crying, with her arms clasping his head to her breast; then a
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