Page 148 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Marriage and departure

At this time my brother Ben had recently been living with me.
Pliskin had moved in with his sister, and Ben went around idle while
I had to support him. He had not been able to make a living since
coming over from the old home. I sent him to Buffalo to a friend
who was in the dry goods business, furnishing goods to peddlers who
peddled to the Slavonian steel workers in the West Seneca mills, but
Ben was not fit for it and I had to bring him back to New York. I
paid ten dollars to establish him in a skirt factory; I bought him a
knife and scissors to make a cutter out of him, but he had no
inclination. Finally, I paid forty dollars for him to the then-existing
removal office of the Jewish community, an organization kept up by
the rich Jews to disperse Jewish immigrants over the United States, as
New York was crowded with too many Jews. He and our landsman
Sam Leventhal, who has a butcher shop on Adams Boulevard, were
sent to Los Angeles, California.
One day, when I came into the house, I saw a postal card from
Buffalo for Fannie. It was lying on the table, and she was not home
yet. I read it quickly before her mother could notice me. It was from
a young man she had met at her aunt’s house in Buffalo. He
reminded her of the scenes at Niagara Falls, when they became better
acquainted. Well, that explained my misfortune. This was the cause of
her throwing me down, making her avoid my companionship. I later
found out that it was not a serious attraction on the part of the young
man: her aunts thought of her as wonderful, and, of course, to their
standard of society, Fannie should not marry a coat operator, but
something better, like a businessman. There were many young
women in the city of New York who were marriageable and who
would be glad to marry an operator, but the human brain is
composed of very soft material, and I presume that the small lobe
that produces logic and reason is composed of only a little hard
matter, and is dominated by the soft part; so I was like the rest of the
“Young Werthers”, who suffer so much they take their own lives.
Well, I was not as young as Werther was: I was already twenty-six

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