Page 123 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Escape to New York
country’s history and laws, and seen the constitutional machinery in
action. As the blind man cured of his darkness is not allowed to see
the full power of daylight at once, so the immigrant cannot grasp the
truth of liberty in one day. In Liverpool, I was never asked any
questions, not in the pubs or shops, or in the museum. It was the
first time I had been in a museum, and the guard showed me the way
with great courtesy. The fact is that foreigners, Jews or Gentiles, were
treated with more respect than I often found in the big cities of this
country. In New York, or other crowded cities, the descendants of
Gentile immigrants will call a Jew dirty names and crowd him off the
sidewalk. That is the lower class; the upper class show their
antagonism in a finer manner.
At last, the time came to leave Liverpool and the European
continent, a place where for hundreds of years our ancestors made
their home. After wandering from Spain to Holland, and being driven
from Germany, they settled in Poland, where they were welcomed to
stay and bring commerce and industry to that undeveloped land.
Although Poland was a Catholic country, the Jew was able to live and
observe his Jewish customs and religion, living side by side with the
Catholic population. We were not as successful as the Spanish Jews,
who held high positions in the then-wealthy monarchy, producing
great statesmen, poets, and philosophers, yet in Jewish learning we
surpassed any other people in the history of the Diaspora. Volumes
and volumes were written and printed right in Poland commenting
on the Bible and the Talmud. In the eighteenth century, when
liberalism began in Europe, a new wave of literature was born also in
the Jewish cities; lyric poetry, epics, and novels began to appear
amongst the Jews. Despite the impoverished conditions in which the
Jews lived in Poland, they could produce men of learning, who in
abject poverty preferred books to bread.
There were four hundred thousand rejections in the United States
Army for illiteracy, whereas in Poland you could hardly find a Jew
who could not read the prayer book and the psalms—or at least the
prayer book, which was quite a book to be able to read. We never
had any of those pleasant things, or even the very necessities of life,
which ordinary humans have in other countries, yet we were cleaner
than our neighbors. Our food was very common and not too

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