Page 114 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Escape to New York
The men told him how foolish and shameful it would be to let me go
away for three years, and that instead I should go to America where I
would make money and help him and the family. He agreed with
them, and right away we went to a place where they sold old shoes.
He bought me a pair, the kind that people wear in America or in
Western European countries, from a peddler who carried his stock of
merchandise on his shoulder. I tried them on in a hurry leaning
against a wall, and I did not notice that they were not a pair.
All my life I had worn high-top boots in summer and winter, the
same as all the Jews and Russians wore; so, when the great event
came and I became modernized and tried on a pair of second-hand
shoes, I expected them to fit snugly—as I had seen some gentlemen
in Warsaw wearing them—so I did not know that they were two sizes
too small. I had those old shoes on my feet for six weeks, from the
time I left home until I came to the Promised Land, and I went
through untold suffering from them. My boots used to be two sizes
large so I could wrap a yard of old woolen rags around my feet in the
cold winter. My countrymen noticed my predicament as soon as I
stepped on the free soil of America, and the next day they bought me
a pair of American shoes.
That day of my departure will never be forgotten by me. Like a
criminal who has committed a capital crime, whose life is in
immediate danger and who must escape from the law in the dark,
without being seen even by relatives and friends, so did I disappear
from my parents’ home in the dark of night, embraced only by my
mother and sisters and brothers whose cries and tears had to be
suppressed for fear of my being detected in the act of escaping. My
father did not come home with me that day; he did not want to be at
the scene. The greatest shock and suffering that I ever caused my
dear mother was when I told I was leaving that night for America.
She bathed me in her tears and bit my cheeks. Those warm tears my
mother shed on me at our final parting I can still feel now when I
write this, in the seventieth year of my life. Finally my uncle Berl
came in and tore me away from her and the other children.
In the modern states of Europe and in America, etiquette and
manners are stressed in school and home as much as education. And
what are manners but the control of emotion, the suppression of

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