Page 13 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Introduction

the land as an adult. That might indicate an earlier generation of
Rothsteins in Pelcovizna—but AR also wrote that Moshe Itzel was
buried in Novodvory, a good distance from Pelcovizna and therefore
possibly the hometown of his grandfather. The truth will probably
elude us.
The final inference from AR’s testament is the second great irony
of his life. He recognized that the time and place of his birth had a
profound influence on his character and fate; what he meant, of
course, were the circumstances of his formative years. Those
conditions—poverty, family life, fear of pogroms, Yiddishkeit—he
amply documented in his narrative. But he did not connect his birth
with his immigration twenty-one years later. He was born, according
to his narrative, during a sudden and unexpected pogrom and his
birth certificate did not get properly filed; since his father was skilled
in dealing with the government, the delay had to be caused by the
family’s virtual imprisonment until the violence abated. This technical
irregularity later resulted in AR being denied exemption from military
service in 1903; his flight from Poland soon followed. Thus, like the
first irony mentioned above, a tragedy led to a positive outcome: he,
and all his descendants (and the descendants of the siblings he helped
emigrate), were spared from the Holocaust because of the date of his
birth.
Compounding this unrecognized connection, AR never correctly
understood exactly when his birthday was. He celebrated it in late
January or early February, but internal evidence of his narrative
suggests a different date. First, as he noted, the pogrom occurring
during the week of his birth was the beginning of a new round of
violence against Jews in Poland. As such, it has been documented in
history books; the account he gave jibes in many details, but not all.
It did start in a church on a Catholic holiday (someone yelled “fire,”
people were trampled to death in the ensuing panic, and the Jews
were blamed), and the authorities took their time in putting a halt to
the looting and mayhem (three days). But this pogrom started on
Christmas Eve 1881, not four or five weeks later.
Second, AR stated that he and his brothers were named after
Biblical characters in the Torah sidrah being read at the time of their
birth. However, Rosh Hashanah in 1881 occurred on September 23;
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