Page 12 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Introduction

attention to outside charitable interests and unwillingness to confront
debtors; a taste for non-religious reading and study; an inability to
communicate emotions; and a complicated love-hate relationship
with his brothers. Twice, in the Twenties and at the end of his life,
AR set up housekeeping in proximity to his brother Ben: those
situations may have had some deep psychological resonance with
arrangements in the Rothstein family compound in Pelcovizna.
Next, the relationship between the Rothsteins and Binshtocks is
not elaborated by AR, but it may well be that his mother’s parents
had some connection with Pelcovizna prior to her marriage. First, her
brother Leiser was a shochet working in Pelcovizna, a suburb
dominated by slaughterhouses, and AR’s uncles were in the meat
business; indeed, the arranged marriage AR rudely rejected was into a
butcher’s family. Pelcovizna is on the Vistula, where Mathias
Binshtock plied his trade as boatman: if the Binshtocks were
originally from that town, then Mathias might have picked up the
skill there, later moving to Warsaw. His son-in-law’s sophistication—
distinguishing AR’s father from Moshe Itzel’s other sons—may to
some extent be the result of living in the big city for many years. Was
David Israel Rothstein a chossen eating kest at his wife’s parents’ house
as part of a marriage contract? That is not revealed, but the presence
of AR’s parents and siblings in the Binshtock household for so many
years is indicative of such a situation. Certainly AR’s father did not
want to return to the primitive conditions of the Rothstein
compound in Pelcovizna.
Moshe Isaac Rothstein, the earliest Rothstein about whom
anything can be known, also may have served as a model for AR
when the latter became a grandfather. This subject is developed
further in the section on the sculpture, where AR’s attitude toward
patriarchal authority is seen as a powerful subconscious conflict. It is
of interest that Moshe Itzel had respiratory problems; this type of
malady has been passed down through the generations, almost killing
AR in childhood. It may be wondered how far back the Rothsteins
went in Pelcovizna: in his 1948 letter to the Polish attorney (see the
Other Writings), AR claimed the property to have been in his family
for more than a century. If, as AR recorded in the narrative, Moshe
Itzel was in his fifties around 1890, then he could not have purchased
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