Page 169 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

At the secondhand shop

across from the shop on Seventh Street, and did my own cooking in
the store. At that time I became acquainted with a Jewish man named
Harris who used to hang out in the store. He was single and had no
place to spend his idle hours except in my place or in Harry Fram’s
place. Harry Fram was then and still is today in the postal card
business. He was a Zionist, as was Harris. Harris was a friendly
person, and knew the news amongst the Jewish people in town, and
told me about it. Sometimes I had to go out to deliver a suit or buy
something, and he used to take care of the baby and tend to
customers. He happened to be friendly with a man, Norman Cohen,
who was in the secondhand clothing business. Harris, being my
friend, urged me to go into that business, where there was a chance
to do better than in cleaning and, in time, build up to a new clothing
store.
My brother Ben, then working at Bullocks as a presser in the
alteration department, had saved up a few dollars, so we decided to
go into partnership in the secondhand business. I advertised in the
Times, paying by the month. I bought clothing and little by little I
accumulated goods, but still kept the cleaning shop. We paid one
hundred dollars a month rent, which was a sum of money in those
days. We did pretty fair, not making much money. When Fannie and
the baby came back home we first lived a few months on Figueroa
Street between Third and Fourth streets in a furnished flat, and then
we rented a house with four rooms and a yard—or, rather, half a
yard, since the house was a double bungalow, on Ceres Avenue near
Seventh Street. We bought some furniture and everything else that
goes with ordinary life. The neighbors, Taylor was their name, had
two little boys Hilda’s age, and they played together in the yard.
An incident occurred during that period when we lived on Ceres
Avenue. Hilda was then about four and a half years old. Mama was
homesick for her family in New York, and I did not have enough
saved for the railway fare. She was never proud and snobbish, so she
went and got a job at the May Company as a saleslady to earn her trip
money. She had to soak her little feet every night after eight hours of
standing at a counter. To say she was a good sales clerk is not to say
too much, for she made the most sales of all the women in her
department. Well, Hilda could not stay home alone while she was
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