Page 127 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Immigration and sweatshops

days after leaving Warsaw, and booked passage on the Lucania, I sent
a postal card to my parents with that information. Fortunately, my
father knew people who had a relative in the United States for many
years who, according to the fabulous stories going around the old
country in those days, had become rich. He got the address of this
man—Mr. Weissberg—and sent him a postal card, not a letter, which
is more proper in a case like that. Of course, it was an old address,
the wrong number, and he spelled the name as it is in Polish, not
English.
Had the thing happened in reverse and some friend had sent a
letter to my father in Pelcovizna, it would have taken six months to
reach him—if at all. We condemn here the different branches of the
government, or the government itself if we please, as it is the right of
the citizen to criticize, but the post is one department that serves
honestly and efficiently, and makes every effort to deliver a letter.
That postal card reached Weissberg on a Saturday, one day before I
landed. It was postmarked and re-postmarked, and at last it found its
way to the right place—and saved me from many vicissitudes and
perhaps from death on the Manchurian battlefield which would have
been my destination in the Russian Army.
I was in a trance when we landed on Ellis Island. I remember only
when they led me to a wire cage and locked me up. I stood there
motionless for several hours looking at those other emigrants passing
by with their American friends and relatives who had come to take
them home, laughing or crying from joy, in each other’s arms,
fathers, brothers, children. I felt like a man on a deserted island who
sees a ship on the distant horizon, but isn’t noticed. In the depths of
my heart I was praying for help. When the last of the passengers and
their friends had left and a stillness began to pervade the corridors of
the cages, my heart felt like it was sinking down into my body and my
head was filling with darkness. Then I heard the echo of footsteps in
the corridor nearing my cage, and an officer with two well-dressed
men stopped in front of me. The men asked me if I were the son of
David, son of Moshe Itzel. One said he was Benjamin, David Leib’s
son, and the other Itzshe, Meyer Koval’s son. I knew their relatives
very well; the officer immediately opened the door, and I was soon

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