Page 115 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Escape to New York
one’s feelings in public? Restraining the gesticulation or oral
expressions of pain and mental distress, hiding them under a thin
veneer, keeps us from annoying our neighbor with our sorrows.
And, of course, any outburst of joy or happiness may cause him envy.
In the old country, where the Jewish population was crowded
together in small towns and lived neighborly, one’s sorrow and
suffering was not hidden but expressed outwardly in the loudest
protests, and one’s neighbors joined in, as well. Thus, when my time
came to leave home for America, which meant leaving forever, it
brought anguish, tears, and loud protestations. The noise was
endangering my escape, because our neighbors were enemies, even
though relatives, who would give information to the authorities and I
would be apprehended. I had to say goodbye in a hushed voice and
leave without one of the family coming out of the house to see me
off.
Young people in this country often leave home for college or to
seek jobs, and their parents expect to see them again sooner or later,
but when those emigrants left the European continent looking for a
new home, there was no hope for their old parents to see them again
in their lifetime. It is for them a tragedy like burying a son. My
mother could scribble a little Yiddish, but could not write a letter to
me. My father could not write every word she asked him to put down
in the letters he wrote me, but I felt when I received one from home
that my mother’s heart was wrapped in the envelope. In Genesis, the
story says, “therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and
cleave to his wife.” When one is married and spends long years with
his spouse, raising a family, his wife serves him as a mother with
tenderness and love. And when he loses his wife in his old age, he
loses also his second mother and grieves for two beings.
I did not have the money to buy passage to America. My sister
Chaia, whose husband was in the army and had been transferred to
Manchuria a few months before the Russo-Japanese War broke out,
encouraged me to get away. She had two silver candlesticks from her
wedding presents and a little gold watch given by her fiancé‚ before
marriage. To save my life she pawned them, all the silver and gold in
her possession, and gave me the money, together with ten rubles she
had earned from doing washing for other people. In her eyes were

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