Page 140 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Courtship

At that time I was eating in a restaurant, where they served cheap
food. Mr. Cohen warned me about that, telling me how boys ruin
their stomachs in those cheap restaurants, so I made an arrangement
to eat suppers with them. I was not particular, and they were not
wealthy, so I ate what they ate: very frugal meals, but better than in
those cheap restaurants. I was then about twenty-five, never having
thought about a wife and a home. My adolescence had been spent in
the orthodoxy of the Jewish religion, in which segregation of the
sexes is strictly observed, and naturally becomes a habit. I never took
a girl out to a show in New York. Of course, there were no movies
then, only theatres, and to go to a theatre was a big affair. Tickets
were one dollar a seat, and I didn’t have the audacity to ask any girls
to go out with me—I thought they would be insulted. I had an
inferiority complex; I considered women above me, and did not
know how to approach them and make friends. I worked in a shop in
Brooklyn, where four or five girls were sitting near my sewing
machine, working with a needle. Whenever they looked at me I was
embarrassed and kept my head down. They laughed among
themselves about me.
Through the ages, philosophers and poets have written about love
and death, the two subjects most often found in literature and song.
Death is and has been a mystery to all human beings in their travels
on this earth. Love, the beginning of life, is as mysterious as death
and often comes as suddenly and without warning. I had been
teaching Fannie Hebrew for quite some time, and, as I said, it was
just my desire to propagate the language of Israel. I never thought of
marrying her or even going out with her. In fact, she was too young
to go out with, not yet seventeen. It was my habit then—and now—
not to call persons by their first name. I used to call her Miss Cohen,
and she called me Mister—that’s all, just Mister. How I fell in love is
a mystery to me. A brain disturbance, that’s what happened.
Time is the master of every human, of all man’s dreams. In time, a
dream either realizes itself or is forgotten and erased, a castle in the
air. I did not have romantic dreams. But love, as we see it and as the
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