Page 135 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Immigration and sweatshops

My friend Pliskin was living on Lewis Street near Grand, paying
seven dollars a month rent. He earned very little so he asked me to
move into his room to make the rent cheaper. I did, quitting
Yankele’s place. The people who rented him the room, the Cohens,
were his landslayt, or people from the same town in the old country.
These were my late wife’s parents, and so I met Fannie. Pliskin
presented me to them as a Polisher, or Polish Jew. Mr. Cohen was not
an educated Jew who knew the Talmud and Hebrew culture, but an
ordinary Jew like tens of thousands of others, who lived a Jewish life,
practicing the essentials of the religion.
Nevertheless, like other Lithuanian Jews, he thought of Polish
Jews as inferior because our pronunciation of Yiddish was not as
highly accented as theirs, which sounded more similar to German. To
the Lithuanian Jew, a Polish Jew was not as educated or, rather, not
as logical-thinking, as the Jew from Vilna. There were more Chasidim
in Poland than in Lithuania, and the Chasidim were very fundamental
in their religion, believing in the power of a great rabbi through
prayer to communicate with his creator directly. Another reason for
their dislike of us was that Polish Jews were not considered as ascetic
as the Lithuanians; to the Vilna Jew, Warsaw and Odessa were cities
where the people were not very religious, where they ate and drank
well and had a good time.
So, when I moved in with Pliskin, and became known to Fannie’s
parents, they looked on me as a kind of man from a different world.
Our room had a separate entrance from the outer hall, and I was not
the kind to be intimate with the family. The Cohens were like many
other Jewish families; a family of seven was not unusual among the
generation of the newcomers. There were three girls and two boys.
The younger boy was about five years old. The older, about fifteen,
was like an American-born boy, and would have very little association
with one like me, who had just come over and spoke only broken
English. The oldest girl, Fannie, who had just left high school, was
more sociable than the boy. Strange as it seems, men do not make
friends or become sociable with one another like women do.
We got acquainted the first time we met by discussing books.
Literature was the easiest subject for conversation between people
whose languages differed. Fannie was working as a clerk in the
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